Town Topics

Veena Trehan • July 26, 2011

We last spoke to Jaylee Mead in June 2006. Players Jaylee and husband Gil Mead were then thrilled their $35 million gift to the Arena Stage – the largest donation ever to a regional theater – would be announced in less than a week. The retired NASA scientists inspired us with their deep commitment to the arts, and to each other.

Jaylee Mead was widowed in May 2007 when Gil Mead died. But she has plunged forward with her trademark enthusiasm and smarts. She expanded her contribution to a theater scene second only to New York.

The 2.5-year renovation of the Arena Stage has finished. Possibly the Meads greatest legacy, it has added a beautiful glass wave to the waterfront as three spaces (including the new Mead Center for American Theater) have been integrated in architect Bing Thom’s acclaimed design. A three-year, live-in writer program and an expanded schedule promise an even deeper artistic impact.

The Arena opened with Oklahoma! This highest grossing play, which has drawn rave reviews, is another Mead contribution—the two inspired Arena Artistic Director Molly Smith to embrace the musical genre.

But Oklahoma! is just one offering in a season that takes on contemporary social and cultural issues through riveting drama: plays about war-torn Congo (Ruined) domestic dysfunction (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and homophobia (The Laramie Project) all play in 2010-2011.

Jaylee believes this range is important. “You expand your own outreach or horizons, and being exposed to different kinds of theater helps you do that,” she says. The Meads have supported numerous spaces, establishing themselves as a top contributor to DC’s artistic transformation.

Helen Hayes award founder Victor Shargai has known her for decades. He accompanied her to the interview and now the two go to many shows together.

“She can be seen at almost every theater in city,” said Shargai. “Whatever she’s doing, she wants to be involved. She doesn’t want to just give money.”

Mead serves on the boards of the Arena Stage, the Studio Theatre, and the Helen Hayes committee. She helped pick David Muse to replace Joy Zinoman and is very active in selecting the top players in DC theater.

But her artistic involvement has sprung from humbler origins.

Mead became the first woman to join NASA Goddard after she earned a mathematics degree from the University of North Carolina. “I had a lot to learn because most of the men had been to places like Harvard or MIT so they had very strong training,” she remembers. “My background was less strong, I’d say, but you make up for it by doing more reading and more talking to people.”

She also went back to school, earning a PhD in astronomy from Georgetown University. She established the Goddard Astronomical Data Center to study stars and galaxies, ultimately earning the Women in Aerospace Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1986 NASA Medal for Scientific Leadership.

NASA was also important personally. There she discovered deep, abiding loves of theater and of Gil Mead. She joined the theater group Music and Drama productions, often being directed by him. Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Vera Charles in Mame are two of her favorite roles.

The couple wanted to see how professionals handled every aspect of shows, so they went to the Signature Theatre, a space that showed several musicals each year. Sometimes they organized their cast of 50 to attend.

The two soon became deeply enmeshed in the Signature. They sponsored shows and underwrote a scholarship for three high school students to attend an intense two-week musical theater camp with Broadway actors.

Their Signature involvement led to the pioneering Arena Stage. One of the first regional theaters and theaters in the round, it was also the first locally to integrate. And Gil Mead soon achieved his dream to sit on the board.

Beyond their artistic contribution, theaters have helped transform neighborhoods. The Signature in Shirlington is a cultural anchor that draws in restaurants and retail for show audiences. And the Shakespeare Theater has been cited as a reason for the Verizon Center’s development in Penn Quarter.

“I’m very pleased whenever I see a theater help develop the neighborhood. For example the Studio Theater on 14th has made a big difference up there with the kind of businesses that have moved in, the people it brings to the neighborhood,” says Mead. “That’s what I hope will happen down at the waterfront.”

The Meads invited casts of different productions to their Watergate apartment, hosting dinner parties that turned into impromptu sing-a-longs. The cast of Oklahoma! has been invited over later this month.

“Nothing makes her happier than sitting around the piano just singing show tunes,” says Shargai.

She is equally comfortable in front of audiences and is one of the few people without notes at the local awards ceremony.

“When she gets on stage and presents the tribute award for the Helen Hayes, she absolutely sparkles,” says Shargai.

Her participation is appreciated by theaters that experiment with new mediums and formats.

“She always finds good in anything,” says Signature Theatre Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer, who has known her for 15 years. “It is great for us artists because someone is supporting our efforts.”

Mead often sits in the front row, immersed in and encouraging the production. Seeing her close by is an incomparable experience for actors, says Schaeffer, one of her many great creative fans. “She’s always giving back. She does it from the audience and she does it through her philanthropy,” he says. “She has this great spirit which is so enthusiastic.” [gallery ids="99583,104905,104903" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet •

DC shadow Senator Michael Brown was one of three arrested in an act of civil disobedience, blocking traffic during a protest outside the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on April 15. Brown joined a youth day Tax Protest targeting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) who has an office in the Hart Building. Reid and other top Democrats approved a spending deal with Republicans that put restrictions on the District’s ability to fund abortions providers with its own money to low-income women, and would institute a private school voucher program that several local leaders oppose. These were among the latest indignities foisted on DC residents already disgruntled about not having a vote in Congress. Many protestors were wearing t-shirts displaying the words “taxation without representation.” Participating in the protest were DC Vote, the educational and advocacy organization dedicated to securing full voting representation in Congress and full democracy for the residents of the District of Columbia. DC Mayor Vincent Gray, who had been arrested at a similar protest earlier in the week, spoke to the group.

Gary Tischler •

Legacy, like passion and professional, is an overused word today. Lives lived in full to the end let us see the real meaning of legacies—passion in action and professionalism as a matter of course and duty. Herewith, we celebrate the lives of three men who embodied those qualities.

Sidney Harman

Only last year, Sidney Harman, past ninety, bought the national news magazine Newsweek for a dollar, picking up its considerable debt. Harman, who loved news and newspapers and magazines, was thinking about how he could turn around the venerable and respected magazine in an age where publications of any sort are in decline and at risk.

This is a little like the story about the 100-year-old man who married a young girl and drew up plans for a nursery. Harman, as you may know from his history, was an optimist, a forward-looking-guy with a boundless curiosity about his fellow man.

In the course of a lifetime that was rich in achievement and experience, Harman, who passed away from complications from acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 92, April 12, managed to create a legacy of family and community, as an enterprising and empathic businessman and employer, and a philanthropic citizen with a keen love of culture which benefited and enriched everyone.

Hearing of the death of a 92-year-old man shouldn’t be a shock, but Harman’s death seemed like a surprise. The man exuded energy; he had a look-you-in-the-eye way about him and a pretty strong handshake. There wasn’t much he hadn’t done and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about, and if by chance he was in the dark, it’s certain that he would correct that situation.

Today’s billionaire tycoons might take note of the model Harman presented as a businessman and employer. His company, which specialized in sound systems, was famous for initiating quality of life programs for its employees.

Among many things, he was trustee on many boards, including policy institutes and symphony orchestras. He served as Undersecretary of Commerce under President Jimmy Carter, wrote books, golfed into his 90s, was a higher education leader and left a good chunk of his own money in a way that will outlive him far into the future.

The most visible legacy is Sidney Harman Hall, the downtown state-of-the-art theater, which houses Shakespeare Theatre Company productions, visiting performance arts institutions and the Washington Ballet at times.

“Sidney Harman enjoyed an extraordinary life, characterized by great passion for his wife, for the performing arts, for ideas and for life itself, said Michael Kahn, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. “All of us, privileged to know him, enjoyed our own lives more because of him.”

He loved music. He was the co-inventor of the high-fidelity stereo back in the 1950s. He loved the arts and he always looked for new challenges. He was married to Jane Harman, a Democratic Congresswoman from California. He is survived by his wife, six children and ten grandchildren.

Also surviving is his reputation as a modern Renaissance man, a historical description that moves far into the future. He was a man who lived a life in full.

David Broder

The Washington Post, the newspaper for which he worked most of life and won a Pulitzer Prize for, described him in its headline for his obituary and appreciation as the “Dean of Washington Press Corps.”

He was 81. He was a man passionate about politics, the subject he wrote about all of his life. He was a professional in the entirely true sense of the word. He made you proud to be a part of the profession he practiced just by reading his work, because he brought honor to it all of the time, with his judicious care for the truth, with a keen passion to get it right, with a curiosity that died only when he did.

Covering politics, being a part of it that way or any way, isn’t always considered a noble profession. Hackery lives here, as does the indelicate art of brown-nosing, affliction from the kind of pollen that fills the air in the spaces occupied by proximity to power, or worse, the desire for power. Broder more often than not ennobled the profession; he took it seriously enough not to let his biases get in the way of accuracy and completeness.

They say he loved politicians as types perhaps a bit too much, an experience that can be a little like being in love with the girl that you know will always have other boyfriends. He didn’t wear his heart too much on his sleeve, and he took little that politicians or elected officials said for granted. What got into his columns was the process, and he was astute in its observance, and what he got from it came from regular people, who talked to him about the issues they cared about, what mattered in their towns and workplaces. He got that right almost all of the time. The love was in going on the road to see campaigns in action. What got into his columns were such qualities as accurate information, hard-nosed intelligence and insights fed by years and every minute of his experience.

He got it right and gave his readers and his peers respect and the right stuff.

Few like Broder remain.

Sidney Lumet

No one every accused Sidney Lumet of being a fancy-pants artist. This prolific film director, who died at the age of 86, came to the movies by way of the theater and live television from “You Are There” to the estimable Playhouse 90. Faces and words, words and faces were the cornerstone of his work, not fancy, haunting camera work.

Maybe that’s why a good chunk of his movies are classics, along with the words and faces: Picture Peter Finch yelling out the window “I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore” in the classic and prophetic “Network.”

Picture Henry Fonda browbeating bigots Lee J Cobb and Ed Begley in the claustrophobic jury movie “Twelve Angry Men.”

Picture Al Pacino as “Serpico” and Treat Williams as “The Prince of the City,” two classic New York cop movies, and Paul Newman in his best-ever performance as the lawyer-as-drunk in ‘The Verdict.” (For the record, my favorite line is when Newman asked about his adversary James Mason. “Is he any good?” “Good?” says gruff Jack Warden. “He’s the f—–g prince of darkness.”)

He was a pro. He left a huge film legacy underwritten by a social conscience, an eye for urban landscapes and a love of the human species. “Every picture I did was an active, believable, passionate wish,” he said. “Every picture I wanted to do…I’m having a good time.” Plus he spent married time with remarkable women, like the actress Rita Gam, the socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, Lena Horne’s daughter Gail Jones and Mary Gimble, who was with him at the time of his death on April 9 from lymphoma.

Gary Tischler •

Every St. Patrick’s Day, I get nostalgic. Some part of me wants to hear an Irish rebel song, down a stiff Irish whiskey, get begorrah drunk in a place where there’s already two feet of beer on the floor and admire an Irish lass with green eyes and flaming hair.

It passes. There are, if my fading old eyes don’t deceive me, more Irish bars than ever ‘round about here, so I imagine that at least today there is a market for the wee bit of Gaelic sound. Many of the newer bars I’ve never heard of, but the old standby pubs still standing, like Sinatra and Elvis, make you breathe with the slowed down breath of memory.

Some of the newer ones certainly sound like old sod pubs—Castlebay Irish Pub in Annapolis, Flanagan’s Harp and Fiddle in Bethesda, O’Faolain’s Irish Pub in Sterling, Virginia, Ned Devine’s and Ned Kelly’s in Herndon, Virginia, O’Sullivan’s Irish Pub in Arlington, Old Brogue Irish Pub in Great Falls, Sine Irish Pub in Arlington, Slainte Irish Pub in Bethesda, the Auld Shabeen in Fairfax—even the Fado downtown with its myriad beers and Irish bric a brac, not to mention the legendary Murphy’s in Alexandria, and the rising Ri Ras where the hold music sessions.

But for my money—and it’s not a lot, I’m a writer after all—its places like Kelly’s Irish Times, the Four Provinces, (now Ireland’s Four Fields) the Dubliner, Nanny O’Brien’s, and the long-defunct Matt Kane’s and Ellen’s which are and were the real thing. And you can throw in Billy Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, which has been around longer than anybody and anyone, serving up square and basic-good Irish food and spirits and conviviality as a matter of family tradition.

Of course, the heydays were probably during the 1970s and 1980s, when St. Patrick’s Day was celebrated a little bit like a hooligan’s holiday, with daylong, sometimes weekend-long celebrations. In those days, there was a steady and large supply of Irish bartenders to go with the Irish restaurants, not to mention Irish musicians who were splendid, played and sang reels and rebel songs and ballads that broke your heart, and got everybody in the spirit of things along with the spirits.

I suspect some of that atmosphere is missing now—I don’t see hundreds of hill staffers running around with “Kiss Me I’m Irish” pins for a whole day, although the funny looking big green hats remain ever popular.

St. Patrick’s Day was a day of wretched excess in those days, and, luckily and with good reason, I don’t remember much about them.

What I do remember is that this German writer loved most things Irish beyond reason. With my metabolism now rebellious of anything beyond a single glass of beer, I can look at this with measured focus, as opposed to through a glass darkly. I think it’s because friends I knew in Washington from the beginning were named Kelly and O’Brien and Murphy and McHugh and so on, and they were the types you could tell your worst secrets to, make the phone call in the middle of the middle of the night. They would take you in if you got kicked out of some other place for the night. They were the boon companions at the race track, the guy who’d spot you a bar bill and laughed at all of your jokes, except the Irish ones. I knew a few, let’s say, and here’s to Michael Kelly, and his brother Hugh, the publican and founder of Kelly’s Irish Times, the most democratic of Irish pubs in existence, if not the most elegant.

Kelly’s was a footstep or so away from The Dubliner, and was once a Hawaiian Luau Hut before Hugh Kelly bought it and once held a celebration in which patrons were encouraged to smash a plastic volcano rock to piece. The Dubliner—run by the estimable Danny Coleman—was also the best venue for some of the greatest Irish musicians around, notably Celtic Thunder and the Irish Tradition. That trio, which sometimes wandered into the Irish Times, filled the house like a rock band. They were Andy O’Brien, the lad the lassies dug, Billy McComiskey, a button accordionist of great gifts, and the vibrant Brendan Mulvihill, a fiddle player of Irish national championship quality, big of girth and afro-red hair, who could make a fiddle do anything—produce tears, sound like jazz, be bluesy and rangy, and tell musical stories as thick as novels. In the past he has been known to play at Nanny O’Brien’s on Connecticut Avenue, right across the street from the Uptown Theater and, lo and behold, another Irish pub, the Irish Four Fields.

But enough about pubs: that’s where all your friends are today if they have signs of life in them. The Irish connection runs deeper than a state of bold and wordy inebriation. I once had a discussion with another fine Irish person of note about the religious and philosophical symbolism of a certain scene from “Saturday Night Fever,” and it says a lot for Guinness and the Irish that this stuck in my mind.

The Irish love to talk, and when they’re not talking, they’re writing, composing, singing, putting on plays, making theater and persevering, in spite of anything, come famine or feuding. If you want to know the origin of St. Patrick’s Day and its consequences, check out Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (or four hours in a bar with some very eloquent and poetic drunks), in which a cop or two make an appearance and one of the denizen’s says “Why didn’t St. Patrick drive all the snakes out of Ireland, and didn’t they swim across the Atlantic and become New York policemen?” or words to that effect.

I love the Irish words, probably more than the Irish do: both the great playwright of the void, Samuel Beckett, and novelist James Joyce, moved to Paris and wrote in French.

A whole new generation of Irish playwright’s have emerged, but Wilde, Synge, Behan, Shaw and all the rest still rise up onto our stage with words, wit and wonder (“An Ideal Husband” at the Shakespeare Theatre right now and “Penelope” at the Studio right now). And Solas Nua, the Irish theater group, is handing out free books today.

And it’s St. Patrick Day. If things should go amiss, remember a few things along the way: there may have been Bette Davis eyes, but there is Maureen O’Hara hair as well. And remember that famous Irish saying: “May you be in heaven a half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.” And may you recall with some caution that famous scene in “Fort Apache” when the Irish 7th Cavalry First Sergeant, played by Victor McLaglen, is ordered to destroy a roomful of rotgut whiskey by Henry Fonda. “Lads,” he said, “let us pull together. We have a fearful task ahead of us.”

Indeed all of you do. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Celebrate as the Irish might and god help you on the way.
[gallery ids="99197,103364" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

It will all be the same. Thousands upon thousands of visitors will jam Washington’s Tidal Basin to see a miraculously beautiful work of nature when the National Cherry Blossom Festival commences Saturday, March 26 and runs for three weekends, sixteen days.

They will show up for the opening ceremonies at the National Building Museum, and they will jam the hillsides near the Sylvan Theater on the National Mall for traditional and contemporary Japanese and American performance artists throughout the festival. They will go to the spectacular Cherry Blossom Parade, to the Japanese street festival, to the lantern walks at the Tidal Basin.

The thousands will watch as the blossoms from these trees, lining the Tidal Basin near the Mall and Memorials, linger among the symbols and icons of our own brief heritage and history, with the bliss of their blossom beauty elevating them to a keener iconic status.

It will be the same as always—white and pink blossoms, astonishing beauty and sights, thousands walking or gawking from inside their cars. Hundreds of events, restaurant specials, street music and performances, talks and dancing, the click of thousands of digital cameras.

It will be like that, and then again it won’t. It will be the same, but hardly so. If petals can weep, they will be moist this year without the help of dew or rain.

In the wake of the gigantic 9.0 earthquake and immensely destructive tsunami that hit northern Japan, and the subsequent – and still ongoing -nuclear reactor crisis in the devastated area, it might be necessary to take the word “festival” out of the Cherry Blossom Festival.

“Commemoration” might be better, for what has happened to Japan lies like haze over everything in the festival. There is a blanket of sorrow accompanying us all even as we move among the trees that are perhaps the most precisely apt symbol we have on hand.

Traditionally the festival, which commemorates a long-standing relationship between the United States and Japan, is a celebration of the basic friendship between the two nations, both commercially and economically powerful movers in the modern world. The festival commemorates two gifts to the United States of cherry tree transplants from Japan. The first grove arrived in 1912: a gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaiki to the city of Washington DC, formalized with a ceremony in which First Lady Helen Heron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese Ambassador, together planted the first two trees on the North Bank of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. A second gift of trees came in the 1960s.

The Cherry Blossom Festival evolved over the years into a major tourist attraction that celebrated the early spring budding of the tree’s blossoms, and it is now a national event. And today and for some time to come, it is a sad one.

The Cherry Blossom tree, depending on what history and opinions you find, is much revered in Japan because of the short duration of the life of its blossoms. They create the kind of beauty that breaks your heart: the way a mother’s heart breaks on seeing her grown son in uniform, or a young boy’s heart breaks when he sees for the first time a truly beautiful girl who never looks at him.

Japanese culture, which includes the practice of Hanami or social gatherings like picnics for flower viewing, teaches that the cherry blossoms are even more beautiful because of their ephemeral lifespan , a lesson about the nature of life itself. If ever there was a need for the cherry blossom, it is now, because it teaches the same lessons of earthquakes and tsunamis—the uncertainty and brief duration of life. But the blossoms also symbolize renewal and rebirth and hope. If they are fleeting, they are so nonetheless a promise of peaceful and warm months to come.

Festival organizers have added a “Stand with Japan” event for March 24, at 6:30 p.m. at the Sylvan Theater. From there, attendees will walk to the Tidal Basin and reflect on the ongoing tragedy borne by the Japanese people. (Donations can also be made at that time.)

For over a week now, a book of condolences has stood open outside the Embassy of Japan. The latest reports place the number of deceased at 8,000, though the number of people that remain missing may raise that figure to roughly 18,000. Most buildings themselves actually withstood the earthquake itself —which broke all records for magnitude in Japan— fairly well, following the structural improvements made in the wake of the Kobe quake of the mid-nineties. Yet tsunami was devastating to coastal communities and the industrial centers of the Northeast. The Japanese economy has taken a huge hit. Nothing will be the same after this.

The Japanese people have suffered terribly, yet the survivors have shown an example of behavior and reaction to the world that others could only hope to emulate. Walking through the wreckage wrought by a tsunami that caused entire villages to simply disappear, scattering pieces of former homes for miles, the Japanese in the Sendai area, have proven to be proved to be incredibly stoic – not brittle and numb, as they have visibly grieved, but doing so without self-pity or hysteria. There were no reports of looting anywhere as there were in almost any other areas of the world where riots, political upheaval and natural disasters have struck in the past, including the United States.

In a matter of minutes, thousands died, disappeared, were swept away, lost everything they owned, saw their lives forever disappear in muck and mud and crumbling rock. Yet in this moment of devastation, the Japanese appeared to draw on their cultural traditions for remembered guidance. This is not necessarily a religious matter, but a question of codes of behavior, of honor and helping each other, of community and acceptance that life for humans, as for the cherry blossom, is brief.

The prime minister offered words of hope, and the Emperor himself went on national television: a public appearance that had not happened since the end of World War II. But it seemed to observers from thousands of miles away that the people themselves, full of an overwhelming sense of loss, were the ones who stood tall.

What changed all that was not so much Nature as the destruction of human artifacts: the instability set off at a collection of nuclear reactors in the Fukuskima prefecture. The burdens of the nuclear age resonate in Japan, the only country in the world ever to have suffered nuclear attacks. People began to evacuate, and then move far and further away, unable to trust the experts, the air, their food, their water, the sky itself. Uncertainty shook the Japanese people more than the earth did.

In the end, nature comes upon you wrathful and sudden, a wave of destruction that leaves the survivors lost, not knowing what happens next or when. So too is the Cherry Blossom dependent on the vagaries of wind, rain, the natural ways of the universe to last long enough to create a dazzling beauty that assuages us like clean, cold water in the desert. We are, in the midst of loss, astonished yet again.

This year as we walk among the blossoms, people will marvel. But the magnitude of what has happened will linger in the air like blossoms refusing to fall. As blogger/haiku poet John Tiong Chunghoo put it: “In the flurry of tsunami/death radio news/Cherry Blossoms Fall.”