Town Topics

Georgetowner • July 26, 2011

Since 1870, Washington Humane Society has been the leading voice for animals in the District, standing as the only animal shelter in the District of Columbia that never says “No” to an animal. They never turn any animal away, and their doors are always open—WHS is the only agency out there open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week rescuing animals off the streets of DC.

Now, WHS is taking part in the ASPCA’s “$100K Challenge to Save Lives,” and if they win the money would help them rescue and save more animals than ever before. In order for them to even get a spot in the competition, they must first be one of 50 groups nationwide that secures the most online votes. This first phase, called the Qualifying Heat, requires voters to cast their votes everyday to secure Washington Humane Society in the final standing.

The competition is stiff—last year over 23,000 people voted for just one agency—and they need you to vote. You can vote online every day until April 15th and encourage your friends to do the same. “Every vote will be critically important!” says the WHS. “We feel confident that once we can secure a spot in the competition that we stand a very good chance at winning the grand prize.”

The Georgetowner strongly supports the WHS as they continue to help the animals within our community, and we encourage our readers to lend a hand. Please vote daily and spread the word about the WHS and the competition.

The Washington Humane Society provides comfort and care to nearly 30,000 animals each year through its broad range of programs and services including: sheltering, adoption, cruelty investigations, wildlife rescue, free and low-cost spay/ neuter services, humane education, human/animal rehabilitation programs, and lost and found services. With your help today, we can save more animals lives and provide for a better tomorrow.

To cast your vote daily go to VoteToSaveLives.org.

Georgetowner •

The ANC 2E has released the announcement of Metro’s holiday schedules.

Metrorail will stay open from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve (Friday, Dec. 24), Christmas Day (Saturday, Dec. 25), New Year’s Eve (Friday, Dec. 31), and New Year’s Day (Saturday, Jan. 1) with a Sunday schedule slated each day.

Metrobus will operate on a Sunday schedule from Dec. 24 to 26, and Dec. 31 to Jan. 2, 2011, and a modified weekday schedule from Dec. 27 to 30.

MetroAccess will cancel all subscription trips on Dec. 24, 25, 31 and Jan. 1. All trips during that timeframe must be reserved separately.

Christmas Day ridership in the rail system historically has been extremely light. Last year about 64,000 people rode the Metrorail system, compared to an average Saturday weekday ridership of 350,000. New Year’s Day ridership is likewise traditionally light. Last year only about 167,000 people rode the Metrorail system on Jan. 1.

Veena Trehan •

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.
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