Thing 61: Arts on Foot

Oh, DC. It is so good to be back. How I’d missed you.

The west coast is nice and all, but you have to drive everywhere and public transportation, if it exists, costs a lot more than Metro. Sure I got to eat at Chez Panisse and the Bi-Rite Creamery, but give me Central or Larry’s Homemade any day of the week. I’ll trade in horses and fig trees for the Capitol dome and my trendy corner of Logan any day.

I hit the DC tarmac running, with a weekend chock full of fun DC activities, which I’ll reveal all in due time. Allow me to start with the Arts on Foot Festival. Food! Music! Visual art! Performing art! Comedy! Drama! Cooking! Cheese! Wine!

Welcome home.

What a joy to walk around Penn Quarter in the September sunshine smelling garlic shrimp and listening to a boisterous gospel choir singing “When The Saints Come Marching In.”

I arrived at the festival near 1:00, after a late and large brunch, which I immediately came to regret because of the all the food booths set up from local restaurants. Cowgirl Creamery had a cheese plate, Rosa Mexicana was dishing out fresh, chunky guacamole, and La Tasca was frying shrimp in garlic olive oil and serving them over paella. All the small plates cost $1 - $5, and while I didn’t sample anything, Jodi was able to make a nice mini meal on the cheap.

I wandered over to the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which was selling reduced-priced preview tickets for their upcoming season, selling old props and costumes from prior performances, and offering a behind-the-scenes tour of the theater. After perusing through the leftover junk on sale, I decided to wait for the tour. The tour didn’t start for another 20 minutes, so I popped across the street to check in with the Bead Museum. Although the sitcoms soundtrack wasn’t playing, it was just as odd as ever. A man stationed at the front was offering the new comers to help them “get oriented” to the museum and its one room. They’ve replaced the Shakespearean exhibit with “The Timeless Cowrie” – a collection of various pieces using the small snail shell that is seen in many parts of the world as sacred or as currency. Or around the necks of stoners and frat boys.

The tour of Woolly of led by the artistic director himself, Howard Shalwitz, and he showed us through the scene shop and into the green room and onto the stage. He explained about how Woolly came to inhabit such prime real estate: the condo complex used to be a federal parcel of land, and the requirement for development was that it must include space for a theater. Woolly signed on with a developer from Texas who worked with them to meet the federal requirements as well as their own, and now they have this angular and spare theater space which includes a fairly large scene shop, two hundred seat courtyard-style theater, and rehearsal and workshop space.

After the tour, I wandered back over to the main area of the festival. They had a tent set up proclaiming "cooking as art," which was holding demonstrations by local chefs. Jodi and I waited patiently for the next demo to start, watching a sous-chef unwrap about fifty small paper plates covered in plastic wrap with pretty pink and pale green foods on them. Then the chef from D'Aqua arrived, spoke briefly about his Italian-style seafood restaurant and the process by which they cure their own salmon in-house. The demo itself consisted of his assistant putting a couple of layers of seafood into a round mold, and the wrapping it in cucumber. And then the masses crowded to the table to demolish the fifty small plates of samples.


Finally, we headed to 9th and G, across from the library to the Flashpoint gallery and theater space to see a free performance by the Washington Improv Theater. In the small black box theater, five improvisers did a 'long form' improvised show, meaning that it wasn't the games and short skits you may be used to if you've seen Who's Line Is It Anyway? It's a more theatrical form of improv that attempts to tell multiple stories that thematically come together. It's pretty difficult and some of the threads succeeded and some of them failed, ultimately weaving together stories of tadpoles, hardware scandals and love on a train.

I stuck around for the free workshop they offered after the performance, in which a dozen of us learned some of the very basics of successful improvising. Although I knew many of the games and lessons already (I did quite a bit of improv acting in high school), it was fun to jump back into it and remember the rush of getting on stage without knowing what the other person is going to suggest and just going along for the ride.

And after all that, it was nearing 5:00 and I headed for home, tired from the day and exhilarated from being back in this city, surrounded by art, theater, music, good food and sunshine.

Book: Dream City

An occasional series on books and movies about DC:

I arrived in DC during the first year of Mayor Anthony Williams’ first term. Of course, I was in college then, focused on my studies and never venturing much further than Dupont Circle. While I was falling in love with my little piece of the city, I was not at all in tune with the political situation. I kept my voter registration in California and couldn’t have told you who represented Foggy Bottom on the City Council. I was still a visitor. It didn’t matter to me.

Now, of course, it matters to me.

So it was with a lot of enthusiasm that I cracked open Dream City while on my vacation this week. This book, published in 1994, is a fascinating study of the District’s modern history, which in 1994 meant one thing: Marion Barry. Even by 2007 DC’s modern history is dominated by that one man. He still holds a seat on the City Council, still inspires the strongest of feelings – either ridicule or admiration. But I had missed the whole thing, arriving in 1999 after Mayor Barry’s fourth and final term as mayor, and I was woefully ignorant of all that came before me.

I knew there had been riots in the late ‘60s. But I didn’t know what had caused them or where they’d been. Now I know that the recent redevelopment of U Street, Chinatown, and the slow resurgence of H St, NE are all legacies of those riots, nearly 40 years ago. The book traces the story of those riots, how they were sparked, how they became out of control, how they were eventually quelled by the military.

I knew that Marion Barry had smoked crack. I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t know much else. This book traces his beginnings in the student civil rights movement, his arrival in DC and his rise to power at a crucial time when the District was first learning to vote and govern itself. It details his original good intentions, his adaptability to every situation, his administration’s corruption and his downfall. How DC fell to drugs and violence on his watch, while he fell to drugs and women.

The book does an admirable job of presenting both sides of the story and the racial implications of each. Why the 8th Ward – so continuously poor, neglected and ignored – keeps voting for Barry, even now. How feelings about Barry are all mixed up in the city’s racist past, a city that was majority black and controlled by a blatantly racist Congress for a hundred years. Was he the stereotype of a black man addicted to crack or a prominent figure of black power systematically persecuted by a racist, white federal government?

The book does make a very strong argument that Barry took a historic moment, full of potential for the capital city, and squandered it in a sea of rhetoric, corruption and drugs. It sure puts into perspective why Mayor Williams, the boring and budget-oriented bureaucrat, was such a breath of fresh air. And it puts Mayor Fenty into an historical context. I knew his winning every precinct in every ward was important, but even more so now that I know a little bit more about the racial overtones of Barry’s rise to power, and his trial.

The city I love has come a long way in a short time. It has changed vastly even since I arrived eight years ago, and in the last 20 and 40 years even more so. For late comers like me, Dream City is an insight into what we missed, and provides the foundation for understanding what lies ahead.

Book: All the Presidents' Pastries

An occasional series on books and movies about DC:

I first heard of this book from this episode of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me. In the "Not My Job"

segment of the show, Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was asked three questions about the book All the Presidents' Pastries. From this, I learned that Prince Charles had never seen a tea bag until his tea with Ronald Reagan, that Francois Mitterrand is very particular about his toilet seats, and the Clinton family's favorite dessert is Coca Cola flavored jello with glacee cherries. I was intrigued.

Then the next week, they invited the author of All the Presidents' Pastries, Roland Mesnier, to come on the show to play "Not My Job." You must listen to this segment. His French accent is just too outrageous and endearing. His dismissal of the Coca Cola jello ("but usually no one eats it") so dryly disgusted. His overt disgust at the foods in the questions being asked of him ("but who eats this stuff?!") so funny. I bought his book the next week.

So why haven't I written about it until now? Well, it took me this long to finish it because unfortunately, it's not very good. Mesnier writes in a very abrupt style, mentioning everything but not going into detail about anything. Over his long career, he served five presidents in 25 years at the White House. He served desserts to heads of state from almost every country you can think of, large elaborate desserts for state dinners, and small ones for family celebrations. He describes these occasions and desserts in a purely perfunctory way, but leaves out the stuff we really want to know. How did he make them? Did anything go wrong? How long did it take? How was it received?

Instead we get paragraphs like this one:

One year, Mrs. Bush asked me to make a birthday cake evoking their favorite sport. I made a full-sized tennis racquet in chocolate, standing up straight on top of the cake, with slightly slack strings, entwined with roses. Game, set and match! Everyone was delighted.

Or this one:

I discovered another favorite Argentinian specialty, an extraordinarily delicious ice cream known as dulce de leche made from condensed milk, which is boiled for hours until it turns into a kind of caramel. This is what I would serve for the dessert. In addition, I served a dish of pineapples -- an imported Argentinian crop -- cooked in a very special way, then arranged on silver platters topped with a kind of sweet pastry, giving them an agreeable crunchy taste.

By describing everything, we don't get a true sense for the time, effort and craftsmanship that went into each dessert, nor the scale of grandeur of each.

If you are hoping for a little juicy gossip about the presidential families, you won't get it here. In fact, it takes Mesnier nearly 100 pages of the book before he even gets to the White House. Up until then, we learn in detail of every job and opportunity he had until he was offered the job in the White House. And once he is in the White House, he has only the nicest things to say about all the presidents and their families.

The book does have its moments. You get a pretty good sense of how the White House is run behind the scenes, the level of excellence and professionalism that is demanded from everyone. You get a glimpse at what it was like to actually be in the White House on September 11th. You learn some interesting things about how world class pastry chefs become world class, the hard work and sacrifices along the way. And there is a collection of recipes in the back of each of the five presidents' favorite desserts. I haven't tried any out yet, but they all look quite good (especially the orange flourless chocolate cake for the Reagan family).

Rest assured, he leaves out the recipe for Coca Cola jello with glacee cherries.