Washington City Paper (July 17, 2020)

NEWS HOW DOES CONTACT TRACING WORK? 4 SPORTS FINALLY DUMPING THE RACIAL SLUR 7 ARTS HONORING THE FIRST LADY OF GO-GO 14 THE DISTRICT'S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 40, NO. 28 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JULY 17–23, 2020

T he Food Issue Change-Makers in the D.C. Food System

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TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 8 The Food Issue: Meet the people who are changing the way D.C. eats for the better.

NEWS 4 Tracing Pavements: What we know—and what we don’t know— about D.C.’s contact-tracing efforts 6 Loose Lips: A Council candidate, a home renovation, and allegations of impropriety

SPORTS 7 Good Riddance: Washington’s football team finally decides to change its name.

ARTS 14 Remembering Maiesha Rashad: Friends and collaborators remember the pioneering go-go artist.

16 The Last Show: Looking back on the last moments of live music before COVID-19 closures 18 Spiritual Connection: A local filmmaker discusses the D.C. artists who inspired her latest documentary.

19 Film: Gittell on Dirt Music 19 Theater: Ritzel on Synetic Theater’s The Decameron

CITY LIGHTS 20 City Lights: Virtually visit the U.S. Botanic Garden and get involved with an eco-art project.

DIVERSIONS 17 Crossword 22 Savage Love 23 Classifieds Cover Photo: Darrow Montgomery; Chris Bradshaw, Executive Director of Dreaming Out Loud

Darrow Montgomery | Rock Creek Park, July 14 Editorial

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NEWS CITY DESK

Tracing Pavements Contact-tracing efforts are active in D.C., but civil liberties advocates worry about the security of the gathered information.

By Amanda Michelle Gomez @amanduhgomez In lieu of a vaccine, contact tracing is one of the few tools we have to contain the spread of COVID-19. A contact tracer interviews people diagnosed with COVID-19, finds out who they’ve been in close physical contact with for a sustained amount of time, then informs those individuals they’ve been exposed to COVID-19 and should get tested and selfisolate. But in order for large-scale contract tracing to work and for people to willingly participate, they need to trust that their health data will be managed safely.

The Bowser administration has been relatively transparent about how contact tracing works in D.C. In a recent press conference, DC Health explained how contact-tracing investigators ask individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 about their location history in order to track who’s potentially been exposed to the virus. The agency posts the percentage of cases and their close contacts that investigators attempted to reach in an online dashboard that is updated daily.

Civil liberties advocates, however, argue the administration has not fully explained how the health data that contact tracers gather is handled—specifically who has access to this information and how long it will be stored.

Local and national organizations, including the ACLU of D.C., Center for Democracy & Technology, and Stop Police Terror Project DC, sent a letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council in June that requested D.C.’s contact-tracing efforts be transparent and uphold the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of residents, but received no response from the executive.

Contact tracers are gathering detailed and private information from tens of thousands of D.C. residents about their whereabouts and who they came in close contact with. In the letter, advocates insisted the public needs to know that this information stays within DC Health and is deleted once it is no longer needed. Now that Bowser is, according to DC Health, “actively assessing” whether to use smartphone applications for contact tracing, advocates tell City Paper clear assurances about how contract-tracing data will be used and stored are urgently needed.

D.C.’s contact-tracing efforts have quickly evolved since the Bowser administration announced D.C.’s first coronavirus case on March 7.

DC Health already had a contact-tracing team of about 65 at the start of the public health emergency on March 11, as case

investigation is used to track other infectious diseases and is not unique to COVID-19. As COVID-19 cases increased, D.C. expanded its team. In April, Bowser announced that the District would hire hundreds of contact tracers and by mid-June, the team grew to about 300. At that level, contact tracers can at least attempt to investigate more than 90 percent of coronavirus cases and their close contacts within one or two days of a case notification reaching DC Health, a metric D.C. must reach in order to relax social distancing requirements. (That said, Bowser had D.C. enter Phase 2 of reopening before the city met DC Health’s requirements related to contact tracing.)

During a June 10 press conference dedicated to contact tracing, DC Health Director Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt explained what residents should expect if contact tracers reach out to them. While they should be asked a series

aspect of that is the participation of the community that has tested positive,” Malachi Stewart, a contact tracer for DC Health, said during the June 10 press conference. “It is that participation that allows us to continue to achieve success and really see the curve be flattened.”

The June 10 press conference contained little detail about how the health data is managed. It is “only used for statistical and public health purposes,” said Nesbitt, “and so its use is very restricted and is governed by very unique and strict sets of laws.”

A D.C. resident who tested positive for COVID-19 in late March recently found herself thinking about what DC Health will do with health information they gathered during four phone calls with her. She asked that her name not be used in this story due to privacy concerns. The interviews were not very detailed—they did not ask her about her loca-

Contact tracers are gathering detailed and private information from tens of thousands of D.C. residents about their whereabouts and who they came in close contact with. In the letter, advocates insisted the public needs to know that this information stays within DC Health and is deleted once it is no longer needed. of questions related to their health status, living situation, and recent movements, they will not be asked to provide their imigration status, Social Security number, or bank account information. Contact tracers are also instructed to never tell individuals who exposed them to the virus. A week later, Nesbitt further described how investigators are told to phrase questions so as to not stigmatize any activities individuals participated in and to encourage honesty.

“What I would say, to my experience, is that … even as you see the slides and you see the schematic flow of how we do interviews, how we do contact tracing, the most important

4 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

tion history or close associations— leading her to believe D.C. did not investigate her case as thoroughly as they currently do. (City Paper asked DC Health how contact tracing was conducted for March cases, but did not immediately hear back.)

The woman’s fourth call with DC Health really got her thinking. A person who identified themself as a health department official contacted her in May, weeks after her first three phone calls with the agency, and after she’d recovered, and conducted what felt like a customer service survey. They did not ask her anything that made her feel uncomfortable,

and instead asked about her general experience with COVID-19. She recounted the dates she was sick and her COVID-19 symptoms.

“I trust the government,” she tells City Paper. “The only thing I wonder now is who retains that information? Will it ever be held against me?”

“We don’t have a lot of transparency into what’s going on,” says Lauren Sarkesian, senior policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute.

Her organization is one of 13 groups, most members of the Community Oversight of Surveillance coalition, that wrote to the mayor and the Council on June 2, raising privacy and transparency concerns related to contact tracing. Their concerns would only be more pronounced if D.C. decides to launch a contact-tracing app as a few other states have.

They sent a letter proactively, aiming to limit the harms other countries experienced when governments took location data without permission. The letter requests that contact tracing be led by public health officials and that data only be used for public health purposes. “Data should not be used for secondary purposes including commercial advertising use and any punitive or law enforcement purposes,” the letter says. The Bowser administration could very well be protecting information in this way already, Sarkesian says. The group’s concern is that no one is explicitly saying one way or another.

The letter also requests transparency around the administration’s contact-tracing strategy, what tools it plans to use, and at what cost, as well as for how long and where contact-tracing data will be stored. If the District decides to use an app to automate what its contact tracers are already manually doing, the letter continues, its use should be voluntary and the design should rely on Bluetooth proximity data rather than geolocation to “put community members at ease that they aren’t under surveillance.”

“We would strongly recommend that they have a public input process before going forward with adopting any digital tools,” Nassim Moshiree, policy director of the ACLU-DC, tells City Paper. “We think there needs to be more transparency, oversight, and accountability whenever the District is looking to adopt any technologies that have the potential to track people’s movements or to surveil them in any way.”

The only lawmakers to respond to the letter were At-Large Councilmember David Grosso and Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who said they would look into the matter. Their offices did not immediately respond to City Paper’s request for comment.

“There’s just not enough transparency or awareness of what they’re planning,” says Sarkesian. “Unfortunately, that’s a pattern we’ve seen with Mayor Browser’s administration.”

In email responses, DC Health spokesperson Alison Reeves says it is the only agency with direct access to the contact-tracing

NEWS system, and it would only share data with other District agencies “when needed per communicable disease regulations” or to connect individuals to services. (These regulations cite the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which would apply to manual contact tracing but not necessarily contact-tracing applications managed by a third party, says Sarkesian.) Reeves declined to say how long data will be stored, but did say it is “stored and managed according to District government standards and accordance with strict security provisions.”

“The District is actively assessing different technologies, including proximity tracing mobile applications for their ability to enhance contact tracing, while safeguarding privacy,” Reeves says. She declined to elaborate any further.

Coalition members want the Council to hold at least one hearing on contact tracing and want members to consider passing legislation that safeguards residents absent federal action. New York state legislators, for example, introduced multiple bills that seek to protect the privacy of individuals who give their information to contact tracers. One bill would bar law enforcement agents or immigration authorities from being contact tracers or engaging in the process. So far during the public health emergency, the Council required DC Health to make its best effort to hire District

residents for 50 percent of contract-tracing jobs. Twenty-five percent of investigator jobs should go to graduates of the city’s workforce and adult education programs.

Some COVID-19 contact tracing overlaps with protests against anti-Black racism and police violence, during which residents expressed their distrust of the Metropolitan Police Department. Some advocates want public assurances that MPD officers will not become contact tracers and not be given

contact-tracing efforts. These companies are helping numerous states manage large-scale manual contact-tracing programs. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells CNBC that more than 30 states are using Salesforce’s Work.com technology for their contact-tracing efforts.

Governors of states like California and Louisiana have informed their residents of these partnerships. If you were to search coronavirus.dc.gov for information regarding these partnerships, no results would be

“There’s just not enough transparency or awareness of what they’re planning…” access to this data. During the June 10 press conference, Bowser confirmed that all District employees were expected to participate in basic contact-tracing training—including police officers, a MPD spokesperson confirmed—so they can answer residents’ questions.

The Bowser administration is already contracting with two private companies, Accenture and Salesforce, for its existing

No matter what pops up, getting care has never been easier

found as of July 15. City Paper only learned that D.C. is contracting with Accenture and Salesforce after the Office of Contracting and Procurement, on behalf of DC Health, issued an emergency procurement on May 5 to hire a contractor to “implement a comprehensive disease investigation/contact tracing IT application solution to support critical operations” related to COVID-19. An OCP spokesperson says the contract was awarded to Accenture on May 20. It’s unclear how much money these

24

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companies were awarded.

Reeves, the DC Health spokesperson, says its “state-of-the-art” contact-tracing platform is “based primarily off Salesforce cloud technologies,” and Accenture was a “major deployment partner.” When asked to explain the May 5 request for proposal, she went on to use a lot of industry speak when describing what technologies these companies are offering, like “management and interoperability of multiple data streams” and “messaging functions and customer relationship management.”

A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the company is supporting D.C., and sent a link to a demo that governments can preview if they’re looking into using its technology for traditional contract tracing, but ultimately referred all questions to D.C. The demo shows how a government might manage contact tracing through a call center and case management console developed by Salesforce. The spokesperson only added that its contact-tracing solution is compliant with HIPAA. “Our work includes development and deployment of a technology platform and related processes and capabilities to support the work of case interviewers, contact tracers and other key functions involved in reaching out to COVID-19 positive cases and their exposed contacts,” an Accenture representative said, before referring other questions to the D.C. government.

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NEWS LOOSE LIPS

Let Me In Perennial candidate Kathy Henderson is accused of misleading an elderly homeowner while working with a developer.

About a year ago, Dereje Feleke bought a modest rowhouse on the 700 block of 19th Street NE in Ward 5. He planned to renovate the single-family property into a nineunit building with expansions in the back and on top.

The abutting property owners, one of whom is an elderly woman who has lived in her home for 50 years, were not in favor of his plans. They filed official opposition with the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and met with Feleke to voice their concerns.

“He needs to make money on the project, and we understood that, but it’s too much and too big,” says Darcy Scott, who owns one of the abutting rowhouses, which she rents out. “Nine units in a rowhouse is too much.”

Scott left the meeting feeling as though Feleke understood the neighbors’ position. She didn’t hear anything for about a month, until she received a call from the elderly woman who owns the other abutting house. (The woman declined to speak with LL and he is not naming her to protect her privacy.) The woman wanted to know if Scott had heard from someone named Kathy Henderson. Scott had no idea who she was talking about.

A former advisory neighborhood commissioner, Henderson has been a fixture in Ward 5 since the late ’90s. She’s launched several failed D.C. Council campaigns, including an unsuccessful challenge to Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie in 2018.

She recently announced a run for the at-large seat Councilmember David Grosso is vacating, as well as an effort to reclaim a seat on ANC 5D. The outspoken character has also been caught up in some controversies over the years.

Henderson claimed in 2006, for example, that someone torched her blue Mercury Capri. A 2016 City Paper cover story documented her dysfunctional reign as ANC 5D’s chairperson.

In addition to descriptions of ANC meetings that often devolved into chaos and shouting matches, the story details Henderson’s efforts to ban single sales of alcohol and restrict all but chain restaurants, such as TGI Fridays and Ruby Tuesday, from serving drinks in her single member district; her attempt to transfer the funds from the ANC’s bank account to a new account, which resulted in the bank freezing the account and the D.C. auditor requesting the commission surrender its checkbook; and the libel lawsuit against her that ended with a judgement against Henderson of more than $140,000.

And in a now legendary 2018 encounter captured on video, Henderson shoved past her

political rival, Sydelle Moore, as Mayor Muriel Bowser was speaking during a press conference on crime in Ward 5, causing Bowser to stop and scold her.

“Whoa, excuse me, c’mon,” Bowser said.

“Don’t do that. Don’t do that.”

This time around, Henderson is accused of misleading an elderly homeowner in an attempt to get the woman to agree to give Feleke access to her property. Feleke’s house is sandwiched between two other homes, and he needs access to the roofs of both adjoining properties to complete the redevelopment.

Henderson also allegedly did not disclose her financial interest as a real estate agent for Feleke, according to Scott and Moore, who replaced Henderson on ANC 5D in 2018. Henderson did not seek re-election to the ANC that year in order to focus on her campaign for Council. An investigator for the D.C. Office of the Attorney General’s elder justice section looked into the matter, and the case is now closed, an OAG spokesperson confirms. Ethics rules generally require real estate agents to disclose the fact that they are agents.

Reached by phone Monday evening, Henderson told LL she was in the middle of movie night and promised to call back. She did not answer a follow-up phone call Tuesday morning. Feleke also did not have time to answer LL’s questions Monday afternoon.

At the end of April, the elderly homeowner told Scott that Henderson had visited her home multiple times and asked her to sign over access to her property during the renovation. Because the proposal would expand Feleke’s property upward, the developer would need to redesign the abutting chimney. In exchange, Feleke would pay for a new fence.

At that point, Scott hadn’t heard anything from Henderson, and as far as she knew, the proposed renovation still included nine units. She emailed Henderson to inquire about her involvement and reiterate that the neighbors preferred a “scaled-back, neighborhood friendly project.”

Scott also noted that Henderson was mistaken. The chimney that would need to be redesigned is not attached to the elderly woman’s home. It is, in fact, Scott’s chimney.

Henderson replied that she had no obligation to answer to Scott and touted her role as a community advocate and former member of the Historic Preservation Review Board.

“To be clear, I do not need your permission to speak to [the elderly woman] or to explain to you the purpose of my visit to her,” Henderson wrote in response, emphasizing her work with the police to “remove the unlawful element” from the property that Feleke is trying to redevelop.

6 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

“I support maintaining the character defining elements of my community and I certainly do not support too tall buildings on a street with modest row houses,” Henderson wrote. “That said, I have a proven record of effectively advocating for the best interests of my community and [the elderly neighbor] may continue to rely upon me to promote her interests.”

Moore was copied on the emails, and responded the next day, again asking Henderson to clarify her role in the project.

“Ms. Henderson is not an elected official nor an attorney and her involvement here is unusual,” Moore wrote.

“For most people, our home is our biggest investment and I don’t want to see any of my neighbors deceived or pressured into signing away any of their rights as a homeowner,” she continued.

Feleke replied to the email thread shortly a f t e r, i d e n t i f y i n g Henderson as his agent while purchasing the property. She also represented him on the “chimney issue,” he wrote, an interest that Henderson had thus far failed to explain, Scott and Moore say.

Moore later reported Henderson to the OAG. After the tense email exchange, Scott says the elderly homeowner told her that Henderson c a l le d re p eate d ly, “badgering her to get her to acquiesce to the developer’s interest.”

Addit iona lly, a f ter Moore reported the issue to the OAG, Henderson showed up at the elderly woman’s home asking if she was the one who filed the complaint, multiple sources tell LL. “To me, it was so inappropriate for someone to try to convince the person with the least amount of resources and ability to state their position as the one they were going to get to sign off on something,” Scott says. “That’s the person you target?”

Moore says Henderson also he has been Darrow Montgomery/File

By Mitch Ryals @MitchRyals

accused of falsely representing herself as a commissioner. She provided LL with screenshots of a comment thread on Nextdoor in 2019 that show Henderson signing her name as “Commissioner Kathy Henderson.”

And an August 2019 email from a resident services coordinator at Carver Terrace apartments says Henderson “called the leasing office and management offices of Carver Terrace holding herself out as the ANC Commissioner for this area and threatening staff.”

Moore also points out a 2018 HPRB hearing where Henderson testified in favor of designating the neighborhood as a historic district, which would have barred Fereke’s initial plan for a nine-unit development.

“Now to advocate for this development when it benefits her financially is an interesting political move,” Moore says.

Kathy Henderson in 2006 Both Scott and Moore believe Feleke has been mostly unaware of the steps Henderson has taken. In mid-June, he submitted revised plans that reduce the number of units from nine to three, which Scott says she generally supports.

“I made it clear to the developer in a phone call a month and a half ago that it would be in his best interest to have [Henderson] as uninvolved as possible,” Scott says. “It certainly wasn’t going to help his case.”

SPORTS FOOTBALL

Good Riddance

countless protests by activists and allies against the team’s name.

That it took corporate America and the threat of losing sponsorship money to get a billionaire like Snyder to finally take action is not surprising.

In fact, that was the idea. In 1992, activist Suzan Shown Harjo, who is Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, became the lead petitioner in a trademark case arguing that the Washington NFL team name was disparaging to Native Americans and the trademark should therefore be canceled.

After that case ended in 2009, with a U.S. district court ruling that the petitioners had waited too long to file, Amanda Blackhorse, a Navajo Nation citizen, took up the cause, becoming the lead petitioner in a second case to revoke the team’s trademark protection.

In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the provision of the trademark law barring disparaging names was unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, effectively ending Blackhorse’s case.

Gover names both Harjo and Blackhorse as leaders in the movement to remove Native American mascots and imagery from high school, college, and professional sports teams. Harjo, 75, has been working toward that goal since the 1960s.

“It was Native people who began this effort to try to change the name,” Gover says. “They have been strategic throughout in how they approach

Facing pressure from activists and sponsors, the Washington football team is finally changing its name.

By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong

A painting of the Washington football team’s helmet on the grounds of RFK Stadium

Darrow Montgomery/File

Credit Kevin Gover with not losing hope.

At 65, he’s been fighting to change the local NFL team’s racist name for nearly half a century. He began speaking out in 1973 when, at age 18, he wrote a letter to the then-team owner Edward Bennett Williams opposing the derogatory moniker.

He never received a reply, and through the ensuing decades, the franchise gave no indication it would even consider a name change during his lifetime, especially once current team owner Dan Snyder, a staunch defender of the name, took charge. But Gover, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian since 2007 and a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, insists he expected to live to see the day when the team would shed its name.

And on Monday, improbably, that day came.

After a 10-day review period, Washington’s football team announced that the franchise will retire its logo and name, a dictionary-defined racial slur for Native Americans. Financial pressure to drop the name from FedEx, the title sponsor of the team’s stadium, and NFL partners like Pepsi and Nike, coupled with the fact that retailers and Amazon refused to continue carrying the team’s gear, forced Snyder to acknowledge a new reality.

“We were right and we knew it,” says Gover, who believes the rise in social justice movements over the past decade, including Black Lives Matter, helped the cause. “We knew people knew it, and we had very important allies, ranging from different writers, different celebrities, lots of elected officials, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and even President Obama. And so that really gave us confidence and strength knowing that our ideas ... were really firmly in the mainstream.”

For longtime fans and followers of the team, the developments of the past two weeks may seem sudden, but for activists like Gover, this moment is the culmination of decades worth of work to reclaim Native American identity from racist stereotypes in pop culture, including sports mascots. It has meant multiple lawsuits against the Washington football team, the creation of nonprofit organizations pushing for change, and

and change the name of its Aunt Jemima brand, whose iconography is based on the mammy archetype, “to make progress toward racial equality.”

When the Washington football team tweeted a black square with the hashtag #BlackOutTuesday in an attempt to amplify Black voices on social media in June, critics pounced on the team’s hypocrisy.

“Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) responded.

“We have to credit the Black Lives Matter movement with having really created the environment where this message could really take hold and people could see that, one, that it’s not going to go away and, two, that it’s just the right thing to do,” Gover says.

That same month, Mayor Muriel Bowser told The Team 980 that it’s “past time for the team to deal with what offends so many people,” and that the name was presenting an obstacle in the team’s effort toward building a new stadium in D.C. Couchiching First Nation citizen Tara Houska, the co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a nonprofit that aims to educate people about the harm that adopting Native mascots can have on Native children, could feel the ripple effects of change.

the problem. From the point where we realized, which was very early, that there would not be some sudden moment of moral enlightenment in [Washington] team management, the plan and the strategy has been to put economic pressure on the team and to devalue the brand through the patent litigation, and now through their sponsors.”

The team’s name change announcement this week, Native American activists argue, would not have occurred without the shifting attitudes towards racial justice after the killing of George Floyd in late May. Since then, protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality have erupted across the country, leading brands to reevaluate their role in perpetuating harmful racial stereotypes. In June, Quaker Oats announced it would abandon the image

“This is unequivocally the people’s win,” she says. “Yes, money talks, that’s very obvious, but there has to be someone to actually say what’s happening for the shareholders to understand what to do.”

Unlike Gover, Houska, 36, wasn’t as confident that she would see the Washington football team change its name during her lifetime. Native people, she points out, have been protesting the Washington football team and other Native mascots since the 1960s. In 2013, Snyder told reporter Erik Brady that he would “NEVER—you can use caps” change the team name, and Blackhorse recently told Brady, a City Paper contributor, that she was skeptical Snyder would change it. The owner has repeatedly said the moniker, which has been in place since 1933 when the team was based in Boston, is a term of honor and respect.

Washington’s decision has also put a spotlight on other major sports teams, like the MLB’s Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves and the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, that also use Native American imagery, mascots, and traditions.

“There’s been many, many decades of advocacy on this issue that formed the basis and foundation for what’s now happening, which is a nationwide conversation on racism,” says Houska, who works as a tribal attorney. “And it’s being brought into the forefront by police brutality and a pandemic that’s got us all paying attention to what’s actually happening right on the ground.”

But there are still concerns among Native American activists about what the next steps will be. In the football team’s statement announcing the change, the outgoing name is used seven times—not exactly a sign that those in the organization are eager for change. It also made no mention of why the change is even being made, and last week, the Washington Post reported that Native American groups have not been consulted about the name change process.

The team’s head coach Ron Rivera has said he wants the name to respect Native American culture and honor the military, and the team announced that Rivera, in only his first year with the franchise, will work closely with Snyder to develop a new name and design for the team.

The current odds-on favorite, according to online sportsbooks, is Red Tails, while there is momentum among players for Red Wolves. Warriors, another popular prediction, also conjures up Native stereotypes.

Sports Business Journal reported that trademark issues are preventing the team from announcing its new name.

“I don’t really have an opinion about that,” Gover says, when asked about his preferred choice for a new team name. “I think as long as there’s no Native mascoting, no Native iconography that invites fans to engage in this obnoxious racist behavior that an Indian logo seems to bring out in every team everywhere ... as long as they leave us out of it, I’ll root for the Washington whatevers.”

Gover lives in Alexandria and grew up a fan of the NFL. He watched the first 50 Super Bowls, and only stopped a few years ago when he felt he couldn’t justify his actions anymore. He has 11 grandchildren, and he wants them to grow up in a world where Native Americans aren’t stereotyped as sports mascots, where NFL fans don’t paint their faces red or wear headdresses to games, where NFL, college football, and MLB fans aren’t appropriating a stereotypical idea of Native culture by doing the tomahawk chop.

That’s the future Native American activists envision, and one that’s closer than it’s ever been.

“I want Washington football fans to understand: This is not about political correctness,” Houska says. “This is not about sensitivity. Native people are some of the strongest people that are in existence today. We survived multiple generations of attempted genocide. It’s about respecting our children. It’s about recognizing that racially stereotyping is harmful for kids ... What matters is our children. We don’t want our kids to grow up dehumanizing other kids.”

washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 7

The Food Issue Meet 13 Washingtonians making D.C. a better, more equitable place to eat.

By City Paper staff and contributors Photographs by Darrow Montgomery Mary Blackford The change-makers who fill the pages of this year’s Food Issue shape our local food system and make D.C. an exciting place to eat, even as the District is gripped by a global pandemic.

Among them are a pastry chef whose crumb of an idea turned into a global bake sale that raised close to $2 million for organizations combating systemic racism, a Mutual Aid Movement worker who brings groceries to home-bound residents at high risk of contracting COVID-19, and an entrepreneur out to prove a food hall filled with Black-owned businesses can bring tourism to River Terrace. They all envision a D.C. where residents have access to fresh, healthy food and economic opportunities no matter their address, and where multiculturalism and diversity are deeply valued and celebrated. May their stories light a fire under our collective butts to challenge what’s possible, in this region and throughout the world.

—Laura Hayes

Mary Blackford, Founder, Market 7

Mary Blackford is in the process of filling 7,000 square feet of a building with Black-owned food and retail businesses. To aid in the selection, she’s held pop-ups throughout D.C. featuring 60 different vendors over the past three years. Her enterprise, Market 7, will open inside Benning Market, in Ward 7’s River Terrace neighborhood, in 2021. She beat out 600 entrants this month to win a $150,000 grant in the Pine-Sol and ESSENCE Build Your Legacy Contest that will be put toward the project.

The food hall won’t just be a game changer for those who sell food and drink. Blackford’s vision is for Market 7 to be a boon for the ward where she grew up. She’s tired of the markers of success multinational corporations use as excuses for not opening stores in the neighborhood. “This idea of us being too poor to 8 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

get a grocery store is not true,” she says. “Other concepts can work. I want to infuse some food tourism on this side of the river, where you can experience our culture through food, family, and community events.”

Many neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River are labeled as food deserts, and the dearth of healthy food options and grocers has enduring health consequences. Blackford uses another term to describe the situation. “Desert seems like a natural occurrence,” she says. “Food apartheid hones in on the fact that there are all types of economic barriers working against Black communities.”

While participating in Sibley Memorial Hospital’s Ward Infinity program, which empowers residents from Wards 7 and 8 to strengthen health and wellness efforts east of the river, Blackford conducted analyses and found 67 percent of people surveyed in Ward 7 go to Ward 6 to get some or all of their food items, and 24 percent head to Maryland. “People can’t do all their shopping here and they don’t,” Blackford says. “My goal is to make sure we have what we need to live healthy and sustainable lives.”

Blackford is an entrepreneur at heart. She attended the Business and Finance Academy at H.D. Woodson Senior High School before majoring in entrepreneurial studies at Babson College. While at Babson, Blackford traveled to Ghana with 45 fellow students and taught 11th graders entrepreneurship.

In Ghana, she was most impressed by the community marketplaces where you can buy everything from food to beauty supplies. “A community that wasn’t rich at all had autonomy in the economy through these central marketplaces,” she recalls.

Market 7 has some vendors lined up, but Blackford says she’s

going to open leasing soon. “At the end of the day, I’m a landlord,” she says. “But because of disenfranchisement that still plagues our community today, I can’t just be a landlord.” Market 7 will provide its Black-owned businesses with mentorship, training, and technical assistance.

Eventually, Blackford wants to open similar food halls in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago, cities where she says Black communities have been shut out of opportunities. But first, she’ll take on the District.

—Laura Hayes

Danielle Vogel, Founder, Glen’s Garden Market

Danielle Vogel comes from a long line of grocers, but the founder of Glen’s Garden Market in Dupont Circle didn’t immediately follow in her family’s footsteps. She first spent a decade on Capitol Hill advising Democrats and Republicans on environmental issues, culminating with an attempt to pass sweeping climate change legislation that died in the Senate in 2010.

Feeling both defeated and determined, Vogel opened the greenest grocery store she could on Earth Day 2013. “I needed a more creative way to make incremental climate change progress while large-scale legislative change seemed impossible,” she says. “Every decision is made with the environment in mind.”

Glen’s is solar-powered, stocks its shelves with products from the Chesapeake Bay watershed region to reduce its carbon footprint, offers free composting, and operates with zero food waste. “Our chefs have to play a game of Glen’s Chopped challenge,” Vogel jokes. “If there’s a floppy bunch of kale coming off of the produce shelf, they’ll make it into kale pesto.”

The store wasn’t outspoken about its sustainability efforts until Donald Trump was elected. “I like to do the right thing, but

Cynthia Hall I don’t like to wear the T-shirt about it,” Vogel says. “It became critical to be overt about our efforts so people understood in this frustrating time that they have a chance to make incremental progress through their buying decisions.”

Vogel is eager to give others a shot. She’s provided 90 entrepreneurs with their first chance to sell products on retail shelves.

Fifty-five of those businesses are women-owned and 20 were founded by people of color. In 2018, Glen’s took nurturing local startups to the next level by launching the AccelerateHERdc competition to incubate women-led food businesses in the region. The winning entrepreneur received $10,000 to invest in their company, as well as mentorship. AccelerateHERdc has since evolved into a grant program for food entrepreneurs of color. The store will award $1,500 grants quarterly.

Like most grocery stores, Glen’s was tested during the COVID-19 crisis. Unlike most grocery store operators, Vogel put staff and customers before her bottom line. First, she reduced capacity beyond the level required by the city and introduced curbside pickup and nearby delivery. Then, she split the employees into groups that rotate and don’t overlap. One set works weekdays, another weekends, and a third is paid to stay home and rest. They’re paid as if they’re working full-time, and hourly workers got a raise.

That’s not to say Vogel didn’t lay anyone off. To help those workers, she created an emergency fund, to which she personally contributed $7,000. She also paid their health insurance premiums through June and helped offset their rents. “People needed more rest because of amplified anxiety at work,” Vogel says. “I’ve never seen a group of people pull together the way they did to get the community through COVID-19.”

—Laura Hayes

Cynthia Hall, Volunteer, Mutual Aid Movement DC

Cynthia Hall’s leap into mutual aid work was predestined. She grew up in the Columbia Heights Village Apartments, an affordable housing complex populated with many single mothers, like her own, who looked out for one another. Hall and her family were among the first tenants to live in the building when it was built 44 years ago. She left the complex when she was grown only to return as the director of operations for the Columbia Heights Village Tenant Association.

When the pandemic hit, Hall found herself delivering food and toilet paper at 1 a.m. to seniors and other individuals at highrisk of contracting COVID-19. The work started at Columbia Heights Village, and then expanded citywide. As a lead organizer for the Mutual Aid Movement DC, Hall answers calls around the clock, goes shopping—sometimes for 100 people at a time—and delivers purchases free of charge. It’s volunteer work she does with dozens of other Washingtonians.

The grassroots network of volunteers connects with individuals in need online or by phone. Hall says she couldn’t have done it without her fellow Mutual Aid leaders, including Robert Schlehuber, Paul W. Jones, Jasmine Maclin, Veronica Perez, Calvin Jackson, Juliet Ivanov, and Maya Gold.

“I would go to a germy grocery store every single morning of my life for the first 50 days after the government closed just to keep the seniors and people that should not be out from going into grocery stores and crowded places,” Hall says. “My heart and my passion was to help.”

Hall always knew food insecurity existed in her city, but the pandemic refocused her energy on the inequalities that persist.

Different circumstances left her neighbors without access to

basic necessities. Consider the worker who was laid off but didn’t qualify for government assistance due to their immigration status or the single parent who works a job that doesn’t pay enough to provide for three kids. Hall tries to feed them all.

The food she doles out is mostly healthy, thanks to partnerships with World Central Kitchen, Dreaming Out Loud, Sunnyside Restaurant Group, and FRESHFARM Markets. “I wanted to partner with organizations that would help me distribute food that was good for the body, because people were sitting at home,” Hall says. In her experience, food assistance programs often rely on canned or shelf-stable foods that can be high in sodium and preservatives.

Hall is still fielding calls, including from a senior who hasn’t left their home in 10 weeks. Motivated by her mother, who contracted COVID-19, Hall vows to continue answering the phone. “It made me want to help others even more because I saw firsthand what that virus could do to a family,” she says. —Amanda Michelle Gomez

Nina Oduro, Maame Boakye, and Nana Ama Afari-Dwamena, Founders, Dine Diaspora

The Black Lives Matter movement has been gaining critical attention around the world, but for the founders of Dine Diaspora, the message is ingrained in their work. “We amplify Black voices,” says Nina Oduro. “We tell the stories of Black entrepreneurs and creatives in the food industry. We want that to grow, and not just because we’re in this movement.”

Oduro and her fellow co-founders launched Dine Diaspora in 2014 as a way to strengthen ties within the African food community. They became known for events like a speaker series, private dinners, and their annual Chop Bar food festival. For washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 9

the past three years, Dine Diaspora has also identified and celebrated Black women in food during Women’s History Month.

Dine Diaspora has always taken an inclusive view as to what qualifies as a food business. “Mom-and-pops have been a really big staple in D.C. for many Black food entrepreneurs, but many others may never even get to have a restaurant,” Oduro says.

“These people are also critical to how people experience African diaspora food. When you get away from just looking at people that have been able to establish bases, you really get into the core.”

“What we’ve always done is [bring] people together through food and the experience of eating food together,” says Maame Boakye. The pandemic presented fresh challenges that Dine Diaspora was able to meet. Their speaker series—Dish and Sip—was easy enough to move online, and they recently hosted several Twitter chats and Instagram Live sessions. They’re also taking what they learned and creating online classes for African food businesses looking to better their brand development and marketing skills.

Now, they’re focusing on how to spotlight the work of Black culinary creatives for their increasingly global online audience. “We’re going to think of a bigger picture, which includes providing more offerings online for people who don’t have access to come to one of our events physically,” says Nana Ama Afari-Dwamena. While the majority of their online audience is U.S.-based, there is a prominent and growing following from the United Kingdom, Ghana, and Nigeria. “I think it’s a great opportunity to interview someone based in South Africa and have people here learn about their craft, their product, and what they’re doing in the food space,” she says.

—Sabrina Medora

Daniella Senior, CEO, Colada Shop and Serenata

As a teenager in the Dominican Republic, Daniella Senior knew she wanted to have her own business. She started a catering company in high school, which eventually funded her culinary education. Senior brought that entrepreneurial spirit to the District as a partner at Colada Shop, Michelin-starred Bresca, and Serenata. She pays forward her success by helping others— especially women of color—reach their potential.

Senior is a mentor with the Latino Economic Development Center, where she helps Latinx entrepreneurs with business plans, marketing, and finance. One of her regular customers had suggested she get involved, and she took on the challenge. “I ask myself, ‘How can I impact women’s lives beyond hiring them?’” she says. “In order to have more equilibrium in the industry, we need to have more women business owners.”

During the COVID-19 crisis, Senior and her team hosted a series of fundraisers such as the Back to Black cocktail pop-up spotlighting Black bartending talent and doughnut pop-up Doña Dona, benefitting immigrant aid organization Ayuda.

For Doña Dona, Senior partnered with pastry chef Paola Velez.

“One of my best talents is recognizing talent,” Senior says.

“That is what I see with Paola.” Velez says the feeling is mutual: “Working with Daniella during COVID-19 on Doña Dona was a breath of fresh air. We got to do something that has to do with our homeland, the Dominican Republic. It brought a sense of home for both of us.”

Asked about the role community service plays in the restaurant industry, Senior says making an impact is now more important than putting food on plates. “People want to know what restaurant owners are doing to support farmers, [their] local community, and nonprofit organizations.”

Aside from community work, Senior has helped shape the perception of Latin American cuisine in D.C. and across the nation. “My goal with Serenata and Colada Shop is to change the impression of Latino food in our country,” she says. “Our food is not just hole-in-the-wall food. In the United States, Latin American food is not perceived with value. Our food is labor intensive. It takes time and love to make. I want the public to know that.”

—Jessica van Dop DeJesus

Paola Velez, Executive Pastry Chef, Maydan and Compass Rose

Local pastry chefs Paola Velez and Willa Pelini, together with Oyster Oyster chef Rob Rubba, set out with little more than an idea, an Instagram account, a hashtag, and a Google form when 10 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Daniella Senior

they launched Bakers Against Racism. The effort, intended to raise money for local community organizations that fight systemic racism, anti-Black violence, and inequality, quickly surpassed their expectations.

Organizers hoped to recruit 80 participants and asked each baker to make a minimum of 150 pastries that would sell for $8 each. In the end, the grassroots movement went global.

More than 2,400 Bakers Against Racism participants, spread across 200 U.S. cities, 16 countries, and five continents, raised a total of $1,859,234.

“The culinary community for me has been the giving tree of all communities,” Velez says. “We were able to use our

resources yet again to bring folks together in a very gloomy and perilous time in society. We’re the glue that binds us together.”

Velez, a 2020 James Beard Award nominee, was furloughed from her executive pastry chef job at Kith/Kin in March. Earlier this month, she announced her departure from the kitchen she shared with Chef Kwame Onwuachi. Now, she’s the executive pastry chef at Compass Rose and Maydan. In her announcement, Velez wrote, “I’m excited for the opportunity to continue to weaponize my food to fight for social justice and equity for womxn, both within and outside of the culinary industry.”

Born in the Bronx, Velez spent many of her summers in the Dominican Republic, where her family is from. She isn’t shy

Nia Community Public Charter School. The class eventually evolved into an afterschool program.

“That’s when I noticed issues around food,” he says. “Teens would show up with Arizona Iced Tea and Honey Buns. We were out in August heat. It wasn’t a recipe for them to make it through the day.”

Bradshaw recognized that people living in D.C.’s food deserts lack access to healthy food and economic opportunities due to the racial wealth gap. His multi-faceted nonprofit seeks to tackle both inequalities at once by employing people in food and agriculture jobs. “The model of begging a big box grocer to come to D.C. needs to come to an end,” he says. “Our mission is to create economic opportunities for marginalized communities through an equitable food system.”

DOL is headquartered in Ward 7, where it operates a two-acre farm at Kelly Miller Middle School. Bradshaw sources produce from a network of local farms, which District residents can purchase with SNAP benefits at five farmers markets. Since 2008, DOL’s community farmers markets have provided 60,000 low-income customers with 600,000 pounds of healthy food.

On Juneteenth, DOL launched a Black Farm CSA that runs from July 15 to November 18. At least one product every week will come from Black farmers. The new program allowed DOL to hire five people from the community as food hub assistants.

In recent years, the organization has evolved to include a 16-month business accelerator for food startups. Graduates include District Chop Bar, Taylored Taste, Pinke’s E.A.T.S., and Green Things Work. Several played a role in DOL’s COVID-19 response.

Bradshaw says that, since the start of the pandemic, DOL has coordinated, produced, and distributed more than 130,000 meals and thousands of pounds of groceries to 10 sites across the District, mostly in Wards 7 and 8.

“We’ve used the food system not just to help folks be recipients of aid, but [to become] agents of changing circumstances in their own communities,” Bradshaw says, reflecting on 12 years of work. He’s found his way back to the land. “When you get reconnected, it’s a lineage and a legacy you feel really proud to carry.”

—Laura Hayes

Tambra Raye Stevenson, CEO and Founder, WANDA Academy

Chris Bradshaw

about speaking up—activism is baked into her career that’s included stops at Milk Bar, Iron Gate, and Arroz. At Kith/Kin, she says, she used her platform to elevate minority voices, and at Rose Previte’s restaurants she’ll celebrate women.

“Women are often forgotten from conversations and women of color don’t even get mentioned,” Velez says.

“As a woman of color, my responsibility is not only to set a pathway for myself, but to also clear the rubble from behind me for others as I’m breaking through. I only know how to use food and Instagram, but I’ll keep using my experiences and my ability to continuously represent women of color in leadership.”

—Laura Hayes

Chris Bradshaw, Executive Director, Dreaming Out Loud

Chris Bradshaw moved to D.C. 20 years ago to attend Howard University. “Being from the South and coming up around food and farming, I always saw it as part of my upbringing,” the Nashville native, whose grandfather was a sharecropper in Georgia, says. “But I became detached from it.”

Before founding his nonprofit, Dreaming Out Loud, in 2008, Bradshaw worked as a server at Busboys and Poets, the Cheesecake Factory, and Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe.

In between restaurant jobs, he would write grants for public charter schools. When a teacher got sick, Bradshaw stepped in to teach a character development class over the summer at

Days before Juneteenth, the D.C. government granted Tambra Raye Stevenson’s WANDA Academy $50,000 to enroll 50 low-income women living in Wards 7 and 8 in a free virtual nutrition class.

WANDA, a nonprofit based out of Anacostia and Abuja, Nigeria, stands for Women Advancing Nutrition Dietetics and Agriculture. It promotes better health and nutrition outcomes for women and girls of African descent through education and advocacy.

The timing was special for Stevenson—all the work she’s done to better the health of Black women in D.C. and beyond has been in honor of her great-great-great grandmother, Henrietta, the last enslaved person in her family. Although Juneteenth celebrates the day in 1865 when federal orders in Galveston, Texas, proclaimed all enslaved people in Texas were free, Stevenson says Henrietta remained enslaved long after that, and only had a few years to live after emancipation.

“That’s why I do this work, in honor of the so many Henriettas that are in our family’s history, that have not been celebrated and uplifted for the pathway they have made for us to walk,” Stevenson says.

In addition to serving as the founder and CEO of WANDA, Stevenson sits on the D.C. Food Policy Council and conducts research at American University, where she is pursuing a doctorate. Throughout her career, Stevenson has used her Nigerian and Southern culinary heritage to empower Black women and girls to eat healthily on their own terms.

“I’ve asked myself, ‘What’s the change that I want to see? What is that pain point?’” Stevenson says. “For me, that pain point was not seeing a space or platform that saw value in the intersectional issues of Black women and girls in the food system.”

As she raised her two children Stevenson says she became aware of the lack of strong Black figures in the health world they could look up to. “I knew once Michelle Obama was out of office, the writing was on the wall,” Stevenson says. She took matters into her own hands and authored a children’s book, Where’s WANDA? It follows Little Wanda, a Black girl searching for food to feed her grandmother, who has diabetes. washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 11

Rahul Vinod (left) and Sahil Rahman (right) “My hope and goal with my work is to highlight hidden figures across the food system that our communities have never been exposed to, besides images of Aunt Jemima,” Stevenson says.

“It’s about not only emancipating us of our diets, of changing and embracing our cultural food ways and returning that to our heritage, but it’s also about emancipating our minds.” —Ella Feldman

Rahul Vinod and Sahil Rahman, Co-founders, RASA

While many restaurant kitchens have been eerily quiet during the COVID-19 pandemic, fast-casual Indian restaurant RASA has been cranking out hundreds of meals per day. Since the start of the crisis, in partnership with World Central Kitchen, Off Their Plate, and Real Food for Kids, the Navy Yard restaurant has prepared close to 40,000 meals for those in need, including free meals for students, health care workers, and financially strapped hospitality industry employees.

Restaurants continually show their worth as charitable partners, even while being tested in the hardest of times. “It’s so important for any business to think about what it stands for, what it’s values are, and what role it’s performing in society more broadly,” says RASA co-founder Sahil Rahman. “We have an opportunity and obligation to find ways to lift people up and support those around us. Not only does it feel good and provide a sense of purpose, it’s also really good business.”

Rahman and his co-founder, Rahul Vinod, were able to mobilize and feed the community after raising $70,000. NFL player Vernon Davis, a RASA investor, helped the restaurant pull in $30,000 through his foundation and JBG SMITH Cares donated $40,000.

The relief meals are typical RASA bowls, but tempered for mass appeal. “Nothing too spicy,” Vinod explains. “We change 12 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

the menu on a daily basis. It’s cool people who have never experienced Indian food are getting their meals in this way.”

Luring Washingtonians to try Indian food for the first time was RASA’s goal since it launched in 2017. The founders chose a familiar build-a-bowl format, but customers layer turmeric ginger shrimp, green jackfruit, lentil chips, and coriander chili chutney atop bases like South Indian rice noodles.

“So many people tried RASA for the first time on the way to baseball games,” Rahman says. Sometimes patrons pop in for a $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon and get hungry enough to order a bowl without realizing they’re ordering Indian food. “When we first started this, we were really excited to be that bridge to Indian cuisine and culture,” Rahman continues. “We’re a space for South Asians to feel seen.”

—Laura Hayes

Andrea Talhami, Produce RX Manager, DC Greens

Andrea Talhami has been managing the Produce RX program with local nonprofit DC Greens since October 2018. It allows local physicians to write prescriptions for fresh fruits and vegetables, which patients can redeem at the Giant on Alabama Avenue SE. The goal is to target low-income District residents experiencing diet-related chronic illnesses in Ward 8. At the program’s core is the idea that food is medicine.

Talhami hails from the Mexican border town of Mexicali.

She grew up playing sports, and her love of athletics prompted her to obtain an undergraduate degree in kinesiology. Later, she received a master’s in food policy and nutrition from Tufts University. “I went to grad school thinking, ‘I’ll teach people to eat right and that’ll be it,’” she says. “Then there was the realization that the problem was much bigger with underlying causes

for obesity and other chronic conditions.”

Before joining DC Greens, Talhami ran a program that trained women in underserved communities in Boston to become fitness instructors. “If you really invest in people and communities, there’s a big impact,” she says. Upon moving to D.C. six years ago, she took a job with D.C. Central Kitchen monitoring and evaluating programs.

Talhami describes the Produce RX program as a tool for doctors to have a better relationship with their patients. “It’s challenging to have conversations around health, behavior, and nutrition when doctors know patients cannot and do not have the means to follow that advice,” she says.

The program thus far is limited in scope—only AmeriHealth Caritas patients can currently participate. Talhami’s chief goal is to make Produce RX accessible to all Washingtonians on Medicaid. “Working with the health care system is one of the most challenging experiences I’ve ever had, because it’s so convoluted,” Talhami says.

But she’s not giving up. “If we can prove to those who have power in health care that investing in programs like this actually works, there can be a huge change within the system to better serve all patients, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or ethnicity,” she says. Talhami would also like to add more locations where patients can redeem their $20 in Produce RX dollars every week.

Part of Talhami’s job is sharing best practices with organizations offering similar programs across the country.

They’re all slightly different. “What works in D.C. might not work in more rural areas,” she explains. “If we come together, we’ll have a stronger body of evidence that programs like this work.”

—Laura Hayes

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washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 13

ARTS

Remembering Maiesha Rashad The go-go community celebrates a pioneering and beloved artist.

After school, she started a secretarial service, worked for Williams & Connolly, and raised a daughter with her husband, Brian Rashad.

She also founded a 95-voice gospel choir for the Capitol Hill Seventh-day Adventist Church, and performed multiple fundraisers on behalf of the church, for Grandma’s

Maiesha Rashad was celebrated across the D.C. area as the First Lady of Go-Go, and her impact as the leader of the late ’90s funk/R&B/go-go band Maiesha and the Hip Huggers lasted for decades and continues even now.

But she never set out to become a go-go artist.

Rashad, who died last month after a long illness, was a prodigiously talented vocalist who for most of her performing career favored jazz, gospel, and quiet storm-style R&B. She performed songs made famous

by Jean Carne and Phyllis Hyman, and her fans swore her renditions surpassed the originals. She led and managed her own bands, which included Maiesha and the Hip Huggers, TopKat, and Lavender Rain.

“Maiesha was already a great vocalist before she ever did go-go,” says drummer and vocalist Ignatius Mason, who performed with her in 2000 Black and early on in Maiesha and the Hip Huggers.

D.C .-ba s e d ja z z vo c a l i s t Steve Washington has often wondered why Rashad never ascended to greater stardom as a recording artist. “She had this truly remarkable sound, and what really distinguished her was … the warmth and natural beauty of her voice,” he says. “She had the kind of thing that you can’t train for, can’t study for, can’t try to develop.”

Derek “Redfootz” Freeman, former drummer for Suttle Thoughts, recorded radio station jingles with Rashad. “She had phenomenal range,” he says. “The tonality and artistry in her voice was just beautiful, and once you met her, she had a beautiful spirit.”

Rashad possessed an earthy elegance and serenity both on and off stage. Friends describe her as compassionate and kind, generous with compliments and encouragement. “When I first saw her, I just thought she was a goddess,” says “Sweet” Cherie Mitchell-Agurs, musical director and keyboardist for Be’la Dona. Sweet Cherie played keyboards for Maiesha and the Hip Huggers and for Rashad’s R&B band TopKat, and over the years, they became so close, she says, “I became her little sister, her family.”

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Rashad came to D.C. in the ’70s to attend Howard University and later American University.

“She didn’t even know who Sugar Bear was, but she kept saying, ‘How all these people keep asking for you?’” Sugar Bear recalls.

Someone mentioned EU’s 1988 international hit, “Da Butt,” he says, and she asked, “Oh, what is that?” At Rashad’s invitation, he stepped up to perform an EU-style “Family Affair,” and the rest is go-go history. Along with JuJu and Sugar Bear, other EU members, including guitarist Valentino “Tino” Jackson and conga player “Mighty” Moe Hagans, joined the Hip Huggers. The shows would start with R&B and funk classics, but the second set belonged to go-go.

Suddenly, Maiesha and the Hip Huggers were the hottest band in town, playing seven nights a week at sold-out clubs across the city, with double bookings on some nights. In the process, the band was circumventing what seemed very much like an unofficial ban on

Thomas Sayers Ellis

By Alona Wartofsky Contributing Writer

bases across Europe.

In 1996, Rashad came up with a concept for a new group, the Hip Huggers. Band members would wear bell-bottom low-rise pants, dashikis in psychedelic colors, and ’70s-sized Afro wigs, and they would perform the best of that decade’s funk.

Maiesah and the Hip Huggers did well, regularly playing Takoma Station, Bailey’s, and a weekly Professional Ladies’ Night at Republic Gardens emceed by radio personality Russ Parr. Mason remembers those Wednesday night shows as crowded wallto-wall with people. “During our break, you couldn’t even get to the bathroom and back in time,” he says.

And then, the band’s popularity exploded, and without really meaning to, Rashad ushered in a huge change in go-go culture. It all started with Experience Unlimited’s

Maiesha Rashad with her husband Brian Rashad in 2014 House, a home for HIV-positive babies, and for the poverty assistance nonprofit So Others Might Eat. In between, she toured with gospel harpist Jeff Majors and developed an anthology of Black American music that she presented at American military

14 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

drummer, William “JuJu” House. Rashad was in need of a drummer, and JuJu, returning from touring with Chaka Khan, filled in. A few weeks later, JuJu brought in a substitute bassist, EU bandleader Gregory “Sugar Bear” Elliott, and the audience went wild.

go-go. During the ’90s, popular young go-go groups like Northeast Groovers, the HuckA-Bucks, Pure Elegance, and Backyard Band struggled to find sufficient venues, and even the top-tier first generation bands Rare Essence, EU, and Trouble Funk

ARTS were increasingly shut out of clubs. “Go-go really had been criminalized for a while at that point and had been pushed in the shadows,” says Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, author of Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City.

“It really took Maiesha’s strong voice to create a space that had even more crossover potential with sets that started off with funk and R&B sets, but went into straight crank that was very recognizably go-go.”

Club owners perceived Maiesha and the Hip Huggers as an R&B band, and the group’s stylized stagewear proved an excellent distraction. “We came out with wigs and dashikis, playing the ’70s music, and then we’d drop Sugar Bear in there and just drop it on them,” JuJu says. “Maiesha was the perfect culprit because nobody would expect her to be doing go-go. The way she carried herself ... they didn’t know she was with the crew.”

Adults who had given up on late-night gogos were filling clubs again, attracted by a new style dubbed grown ‘n’ sexy. “We were mixing R&B music with go-go, and that really started the grown ‘n’ sexy era, when a lot of bands were taking songs off the radio and placing a go-go beat underneath,” Sweet Cherie says.

Other bands jumped on the grown ‘n’ sexy feel, among them Suttle Thoughts and Lissen, and then later Vybe, Let It Flow, Be’la Dona,

Faycez You Know, Familiar Faces, Ms. Kim & Scooby, Donnell Floyd’s Team Familiar, and others. Even Junkyard took notice, playing shows as an alter-ego band, ASJ, an acronym for Another Side of Junk.

“What Maiesha brought was an era that’s almost like the Harlem Renaissance,” says Let It Flow drummer “Lil” James Ellis. “You had your working class people with the good government jobs who wanted a more mature sound and shows where you could come out and dress up. Not that Chuck Brown hadn’t already done that, but this brought out a different class of people. Now we have go-go that fits your level of age and sophistication.”

By the end of 1999, the Hip Huggers’ grueling performance schedule began to take its toll. Rashad took time off to recover from chronic back and neck pain. “The band continued to play as long as we could, but it was like having the Revolution play without Prince,” Sweet Cherie says. The EU wing of the Hip Huggers returned to performing as EU, Cherie joined Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers, and other grown ‘n’ sexy bands picked up the Hip Huggers’ audience and set list.

But in less than three years, R ashad achieved even more than creating an entire subgenre of go-go. She also paved the9.875” way for female artists who came after her. Despite the popularity of early all-female groups

Pleasure and Precise, go-go has long been a male-dominated culture.

“She was the female voice at the center of a band that not only led the way for a lot of leading ladies like Michelle Blackwell and Kacey [Williams] from Black Alley, but also really made it an essential piece,” Hopkinson says. “Now you almost can’t have a go-go band without a leading lady … a strong female voice centering the heart and soul of a band.”

DontMuteDC activists Ron Moten and Hopkinson were organizers of the First Ladies of Go-Go event last September at the Eaton Hotel, which featured Rashad along with Blackwell, Backyard Band’s Sweet Thang, Williams, TCB’s Chrystian “Crissy B” Barnes, and the Chuck Brown Band’s Takesa “KK” Donelson, who is Brown’s daughter. “To see all these women in go-go performing together, it was beautiful honestly,” Crissy B says.

“What the First Ladies of Go-Go set up was something that’s so important in this community of females in the D.C. culture,” Williams says. “I think that Maiesha was the catalyst for that, and she showed so much encouragement and support when she was there. It brought us all closer together. It was powerful to realize how much we kind of need each other.”

It was a night filled with an overwhelming

show of love for Rashad, who was recovering from surgery, walked using a cane, and sat for much of the set. She performed her trademark Jackson 5 cover, “I Want You Back,” improvising to add names of the stars go-go has lost. There was also humor. “Whenever she would take a picture she would do this kissy duck face, and it was so cute,” Williams says.

“We all laughed about that.”

For JuJu, Rashad was a close friend and musical partner who can never be replaced.

“Maiesha was an angel, no doubt about that,” he says. “She was my sister, not my band member. She could go into my house, go into my icebox, take my car and my bank card.

That’s how close we were.”

Two mont hs af ter t he Eaton event, DontMuteDC’s Go-Go Awards honored her with an induction into The Go-Go Hall of Fame. Her daughter, Raina Rashad, flew in to surprise her as the award was presented. “It meant everything to her,” Raina says.

Moten now says he is gratified that she lived long enough to receive the honor. “There’s nobody who did what she did,” he says. “I’m so glad she got her flowers when she was still here with us.”

That night, Sugar Bear was proud to watch his old friend accept the award. “She was a beautiful lady in every way, and she’ll be missed,” he says. “I thank her for blessing our go-go culture.”

DC Public

Library

Phase 2 Reopen Services

Effective June 29, 2020 Anacostia | Benning | Cleveland Park | Mt. Pleasant | Northeast | Shepherd Park | West End | Woodridge

Library Hours:

Takeout services include:

Mon – Fri: 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Closed for Daily Cleaning: 2 – 3 p.m.

Saturday and Sunday: Closed

■ Book Pick up ■ Remote Print Job Pick up ■ Computer Access ■ Full service printing

COMING SOON...

Lounge seating and access to study rooms.

Customers must continue to wear a face mask and practice social distancing.

5.541

These locations will open July 6 for returns only. Takeout services will begin on July 13.

Bellevue | Capitol View | Francis A. Gregory | Petworth | Shaw | Tenley-Friendship

For more information on additional services and branch re-openings, please visit dclibrary.org/reopen. washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 15

ARTS

The Last Show

Darrow Montgomery/File

A writer reflects on the last concert he saw before coronavirus shut down live music.

Black Cat on 14th Street NW

By Richard Barry Contributing Writer March 9th, Black Cat, Destroyer. I wish I had a ticket stub.

The cascading cancelations, postponements, and reschedulings of the COVID-19 era have quieted the music world, and the silence is off-putting. With arenas, theaters, and clubs shuttered under health mandates, and live music hubs like Los Angeles and New York City considering putting off concerts until 2021, the next in-the-flesh note sounds very far away.

Lamenting the loss of discretionary entertainment seems low priority at the moment, but the inability of fans to gather and hear a favorite artist underscores the absence of simple pleasures and the drabness of socially distanced living.

Similar to food service’s takeout pivot, the music industry has shifted to home distribution with artists streaming performances.

16 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

But like some menu items, the quality of live music suffers when not consumed immediately and in-person. Experiencing an artist online remains a good option, but when it’s the only option, the texture and enjoyment diminish in the delivery and a previously crisp and nourishing act can wind up with the appeal of soggy fries.

Craving a concert firsthand, I have turned instead to the cellphone archive. Videos of questionable quality, previously gathering dust in the photo scroll, have now reached live show status under pandemic conditions.

Blurry vignettes of Destroyer at D.C.’s Black Cat, my last in-reallife concert before in-real-life ended, play like found footage of a bygone era.

Dan Bejar, tall and louche, hunches over the microphone, creakily reciting the fantastic tone poems of his lyrical spell book.

His gray-flecked beard and black mass of wiry hair give him a dark, mystic quality like Alejandro Jodorowsky in El Topo. He

seems like an end-times guy. Not necessarily a prepper or panicbuyer, but a weary, sardonic prophet of doom.

In my shaky bootleg of “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood,” the standout number from Destroyer’s 2017 album ken, curving, low bass lines and tumbling percussion backtrack Bejar’s apocalyptic musings with gallows humor to match.

Here he envisions “towers coming up for air” and “dead flowers on the skyline,” then takes a break from the modern-day Noah’s ark imagery to ask, “Hey, how was the wine, baby?”

As the old political electability saying goes, Bejar is the musician you most want to have a beer (or two) with, especially when it’s all hitting the fan.

I paid cash at the door for Destroyer, receiving a red hand stamp instead of a ticket.

“Crimson Tide,” the show opener and opening track from this year’s Destroyer release Have We Met, contains an eerily prescient line with Bejar comparing himself to “an ocean stuck inside hospital corridors.”

At that moment, the Seattle area, a few hours south of Bejar’s hometown of Vancouver, marked the U.S. coronavirus epicenter with 22 deaths.

Although parsing future events from lyrics makes for a tempting quarantine pastime, reading such real-life messages into Bejar’s tea leaves does a disservice to his evocative, imprecise spools of language. While undeniably vatic, Bejar’s prophecy hits the ear as less date-specific, manic street-preacher style and more vague mythos, giving voice not to what will happen, but what could be.

And as far as what could happen, no one at Black Cat that night had any idea.

Near capacity, the audience distributed itself densely across the venue’s black and white checkered floor squares.

Unconcerned by the close proximity, the crowd nodded to the music in vibing approval, not worrying about buying or wearing masks for another several weeks.

At the back of the concert hall, I watched the show from the raised vantage of the Red Room Bar. An over-served gentleman in a Hawaiian shirt shoved on a closed elevator door, unsuccessfully seeking the restroom.

When concerts start again, what will they look like? In spring, an outdoor venue in Denmark hosted a drive-in show with concertgoers tuning in to an FM radio station. On a recent Live Nation earnings call, Michael Rapino, president and CEO of the global ticketing service, detailed concert reopening scenarios that included, in addition to drive-ins, reduced crowds and bigger artists playing smaller venues.

But by nature, concerts stand in direct contrast to the isolations of a lockdown: unsanitized crowd surfing, high-fives from strangers, mosh pit collisions, and all of the physical energy that a song inspires bubbling over, joyously uncontained and definitely not 6 feet apart.

The connecting thrill of live music creates a fan base fellowship, almost as essential as the music itself and just as missed. When live music makes its comeback, I hope its mojo does as well, transcending space-making precautions, however necessary they may be.

Near the show’s end, Bejar and his band left the stage, and the audience cheered for an encore. More than four months later, with the whole music touring industry having exited stage left, it seems as though an interminable break has settled in between sets. As states reopen in a disjointed, haphazard fashion, music venues do not number among the early phase vanguards, leaving fans waiting and artists stuck waiting in the wings.

When Destroyer returned, they closed the show with the triumphant, scale-soaring, nine-minute epic “Rubies.” In what now seems like an early act of social distance protest—and probably a Destroyer first—the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and a partner grinded away on each other like mortar and pestle. I wish I had a video.

Four days later, complying with a city health order, Black Cat shut its doors. Destroyer played their last uncanceled tour date in Nashville. And by then, the red stamp on the back of my hand had worn off.

DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD

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Shark Sightings

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washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 17

ARTS

Spiritual Connection The filmmaker behind Kindred Spirits talks about its special story and documenting D.C. history.

By Kayla Randall @whichkayla

WCP: How big of a part does D.C. play in the story of these women and their art?

Years ago, a painting on a brochure ended up sparking a documentary idea for independent filmmaker Cintia Cabib. The creator of that painting, Hilda Wilkinson Brown, is one of the subjects of her new film, Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell. It tells the story of the bond between a Black American aunt and niece who endured the extraordinary hardships of their eras—the Great Depression and racial segregation—and became artists and educators in D.C. Howard University’s WHUT-TV is broadcasting Kindred Spirits on July 16 and 19, and Cabib and another one of the film’s subjects, Lilian Thomas Burwell, will have a virtual conversation in support of the documentary on July 23, hosted by the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives. Cabib spoke with City Paper about her film and why it’s so important to preserve local history.

CC: A huge part. I love exploring the neighborhoods in D.C., and I love learning about D.C. history. A lot of my documentaries have incorporated D.C. history. Women artists, especially

African American women artists, are very underrepresented, unsung. There are so many artists out there whose stories should be told. I really wanted to bring to light the lives and work and experiences of these two women, the society in which they grew up and excelled despite the fact that they were discriminated against.

WCP: Do you think of this film as preserving D.C. history?

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

WCP: How did Kindred Spirits come together?

Hilda Wilkinson Brown

Lilian Thomas Burwell

CC: Definitely, because I feel like my work as a documentary filmmaker, when I produce these types of documentaries, I am preserving D.C. history. Lilian Burwell, she is now 93. She is the one person who knows the most about her aunt Hilda’s life and work, and can talk about it and can talk about her own life and work as well. If I didn’t do this now, this could be lost, it would be lost. When she is no longer living, who can tell the story? She is the one who can tell that story and the one who can provide access to so much of her artwork. I did tons of archival research: museum collections, university collections, special library collections. But at the same time, Lilian had all these family photos, which I could use, both hers and Hilda’s. The importance of preserving these photos is huge. I was able to access all this material through Lilian, as well as her story. I see that as such an important part of my work, to get these stories out there.

WCP: What is your process as an independent filmmaker trying to tell these stories?

All images courtesy of Lilian Thomas Burwell

Cintia Cabib: In 2014, I was presenting two other documentaries that I had produced at a conference held by the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. At the conference, there were a lot of tables set up with different historical associations and organizations. On one of the tables, I saw a brochure, and on it I saw this beautiful modernist painting in color of a street scene in Washington, D.C. It was called “Third and Rhode Island” and the artist was Hilda Wilkinson Brown. I had never heard of her before, and I was really struck by that painting.

I wanted to find out more about her. In doing my research, I found that she had a niece, whose name was Lilian Thomas Burwell, and I found her contact information.

Lilian was living in Highland Beach, Maryland, so I sent her an email, and I told her I wanted to learn more about her aunt’s work.

She was thrilled to hear from me because it turned out that her aunt had played a really influential role in her life. She told me that they were really close, that because of her aunt, her parents agreed that Lilian could study art to become an art educator like her aunt and pursue her art that way. I learned that Lilian had become a very accomplished artist herself.

After my initial idea about maybe producing a documentary about her aunt, I decided to produce a documentary about both of them, their really close relationship.

As I learned more about the work that Hilda did, the schools that she attended and the schools that she taught in, Lilian being born during the Great Depression, going to Dunbar High School when schools were segregated, I really wanted to provide a historical context for the times during which they lived. I decided that I wanted to weave that into the documentary as well.

Hilda lived for most of her life in LeDroit Park, a historic neighborhood in D.C. where many accomplished African Amerians lived— civil rights activists, artists, authors, elected officials. She drew inspiration for many of her paintings from LeDroit Park. I really want people to discover their artwork, because for me it was a discovery, so I want to share that with other people. A lot of their work is not in the public view. It hasn’t been exhibited widely. A film can do that: It’s there and it preserves it forever.

18 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

“Third and Rhode Island” by Hilda Wilkinson Brown

CC: I would say that, for me, the most important thing in terms of being an independent filmmaker is that I have a love and passion for what I do, and I have a lot of curiosity about people and places and history and issues. I’m always looking for good stories. You have to have a drive to do it despite having setbacks, despite nobody asking you to do it. You do face rejection. You have to believe in what you’re doing and pursue it. I’m the type of person who really likes to have a final product at the end. That’s one of the things I like about documentary filmmaking, you do have a final product. The research, all the archival research, I love—just the discoveries that I make, finding those elements and images that I feel will really make the documentary so much more interesting and visual. Even though it’s a lot of work, I love doing all that. You open up a file when you’re at an archival museum and you suddenly find the image that you’re looking for; you didn’t even know it existed. It’s a real education.

ARTS FILM REVIEW

ARTS THEATER REVIEW

Story Time The Decameron Adapted by Synetic Theater Based on the stories by Giovanni Boccaccio Streaming online through July 31 at synetictheater.org

Window Dressing Dirt Music Directed by Gregor Jordan It’s time for a moratorium on characters who jump fully clothed into swimming pools and linger underwater to hide from reality.

The Graduate invented this scene, Rushmore perfected it, and dozens of lesser movies have screwed it up. Dirt Music should drown the trope once and for all. Halfway through this dreadful Aussie romance film, Georgie (Kelly Macdonald) jumps into a pool to avoid a confrontation with her father at her mother’s funeral. It adds nothing to the story, except to remind you of better ones, and it’s one of many instances in which the filmmakers use a cliche in place of character development.

Adapted from an award-winning novel by Tim Winton and directed by Gregor Jordan, Dirt Music suffers from a fundamental flaw common in poor page-to-screen adaptations: It fails to externalize the inner life of its characters, and we end up focusing far more on their outsides. Case in point is Georgie, who is in a relationship with Jim (David Wenham), a widowed fisherman with two children, but spends her days drinking white wine and passing out on their expensive couch. She is rescued from her self-inflicted doldrums when she catches the appropriately-named Luther Fox (Garrett Hedlund) fishing in her boyfriend’s ocean. She happens to be skinny-dipping at the time. He motors over to her. “I thought you were a body,”

he says. “I am a body,” she coyly replies.

It plays like a bad romance novel. Luther has a dog and a truck and an excellent body, and he doesn’t say much. He’s not really a human being. More like a Wrangler jeans ad come to life. These two beautiful strangers jump into the sack before we even get to know them—they don’t even stop to take their clothes off—which would be fine if the film didn’t have higher aspirations. I could have gone for Unfaithful down under. Macdonald has a natural beauty here, and Hedlund, with his chiseled jaw and blonde locks constantly falling over his eyes, looks like the offspring of Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt.

Few people will complain about that.

But Dirt Music is split between its tawdry beginning and its melodramatic second half, in which revelations about Luther’s backstory— he lost his brother, sister-in-law, and niece in a car accident that Georgie is unknowingly connected to—threaten to unravel their relationship. It’s not surprising, since their connection is already paper-thin. With such poor characterization and off-tempo pacing, the film is somehow both plodding and rushed at once. There’s simply no chance for the viewer to find their way into the story. As a result, we remain on the outside looking in.

To be clear, the outsides are pretty great. The people are beautiful and the Australian landscape looks wild and wondrous. Dirt Music is intended as a film about sad, brooding people who express themselves physically because words can’t convey the depth of their feelings.

Instead, with little effort by the filmmakers to turn the literary into cinema, its only value is its surface. If this were a tourism ad, it could do wonders for the Australian economy. As a film, Dirt Music leaves us stuck in the mud. —Noah Gittell Dirt Music is available Friday to stream on VOD.

The Decameron, a series of 14th century Italian novellas about surviving the Black Death, is enjoying a surprising renaissance during the current coronavirus crisis.

On July 7, the New York Times Magazine released “The Decameron Project,” a series of 29 short stories that contemporary authors wrote in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For New York’s Public Theater, playwright Richard Nelson penned a sequel to his Apple Family plays that was performed on Zoom. After high school English teacher Barbara Apple explains The Decameron’s premise—10 young people sheltering together each tell a story for 10 days—the Apple siblings take turns telling stories about how they pass the time. In Toronto, DLT, a theater company with roots in Florence, Italy, set up “Theatre On-Call,” which allows patrons to dial-in and hear a different Decameron-based story each day.

Now, Crystal City’s Synetic Theater, a physical theater troupe that specializes in literary adaptations, usually relying on music and movement to tell stories rather than spoken dialogue, has created a Decameron of its own.

This Decameron takes the form of 31 short films, ranging in length from four to 17 minutes, each inspired by one or more of Boccaccio’s stories. For as little as $10 (the entire series is offered on a pay-what-you-can basis), viewers can access a four-hour virtual rabbit hole of content that approximates the Synetic experience without having to wander through the underground warrens of Crystal City looking for the brick-and-mortar theater.

Most vignettes fall into one of three categories, with some overlap: clownish, Charlie Chaplin-like silent films; explorations of loneliness and tedium, evoked with varying degrees of comedy; and relationship dramas following Boccaccio’s bizarre plot outlines, including lots of love triangles and a head buried in a pot of basil.

A handful of outliers rank among the series’ best films. For Day 2, dancer Francesca Jandasek donned a series of wedding gowns and wandered through the Los Angeles foothills to film a gorgeous mediation on religion, loneliness, and desire. For Day 3, Renata Loman created a Punch and Judy show that, while not exactly copying Avenue Q, incorporates multi-position puppet sex.

“Sexy time is the best time, for sure,” advises a Dr. Ruth-esque marionette. “Anytime you can get sexy time, you should have sexy time.

You all work from home, right?”

She goes on to tell a story about an angry husband who crams his cheating wife into a

wine barrel and sells her off like cheap pinot noir. If that sounds odd, skip ahead to Day 7 for company member Thomas Beheler’s condensed “Draw My Life” version of 10 stories sketched on a white board. It’s hysterical, while also providing quality context for the 14thcentury source material.

This Synetic Decameron is not quite bingeworthy, which is to say, you’ll appreciate the films more if you digest a few at a time rather than all in one go. Synetic grouped them into 10 clusters of three or four, dropping a new set each day. (Be forewarned that two clunkers, which involve a very sappy COVID-19 love triangle and a melodrama about two dudes fighting over toilet paper, pop up on Days 3 and 8, respectively.)

While the more serious ruminations include some gorgeous cinematography, such as Chelsea Thaler’s game of chess played on a deserted beach, it’s the slapstick “silent” films that consistently play to Synetic’s strengths. Because the movementbased company features non-unionized performers, actors sometimes start there and move on to D.C.’s larger Equity theaters.

That was the case for Ryan Sellers, who virtually returns to Synetic to portray a fake beggar discovered by his neighbor on Day 8. Several performers who moved on from D.C. physically also make a comeback in the Decameron, including Jandasek and her partner Dan Istrate. She reappears in his film as one of two comely fitness instructors who convince a lonely, stodgy-looking neighbor into having a three-way that incorporates a Gyrotonic pulley tower. Istrate’s Day 6 movie ends with the camera focused on Jandasek’s gorgeous gams. The couple is doing the tango, sideways, while moving up a staircase. Sexy time indeed.

All performers were paid for contributing to The Decameron, and received mentorship and filmmaking help as needed. Perhaps the most important takeaway from this often brilliant series is that Synetic artists are versatile, resourceful, and abundantly creative. If these films represent what they can cook up while sheltering in their homes, great things should transpire when they reunite together onstage.

—Rebecca J. Ritzel To watch the show, visit https://synetictheater. org/event_ pages/the-decameron. Pay what you can.

washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 19

CITY LIGHTS City Lights

Chasing Dream You love Rocky movies; your significant other loves American Idol.

Is there a movie you’d both enjoy? The National Museum of Asian Art’s annual Made in Hong Kong Film Festival, now in its 25th year, has the answer with the latest from prolific director and festival favorite Johnnie To. Jacky Heung stars as Tiger, a mixed martial arts fighter who meets-cute with aspiring singer-songwriter Cuckoo (Keru Wang). The mismatched pair naturally end up together, but what happens in the middle is nearly two hours of inventive and largely unpredictable spectacles that mash up enough plot to drive at least half a dozen movies. As Tiger defeats increasingly brutal opponents, Cuckoo faces a different challenge: her own insecurity, which is really all that keeps her from landing a spot on the TV show Perfect Diva. This sports-and-pop hybrid careens through brutal fight scenes and vivid musical production numbers that would be the envy of any Hollywood producer. With a more than 40-year career that includes such recent highlights as the 3D musical Office and the crime drama Drug War, To is an absurdly effective showman. But he does more than just entertain; fascinating themes of authenticity and media manipulation emerge from a roller-coaster ride that’s equal parts body horror and finding-your-voice fantasy.

It’s too bad a crowd-pleaser like Chasing Dream can’t be screened for a cheering group. You’ll just have to root for its protagonists at home. The film is streaming through July 24 via the National Museum of Asian Art. Free.

—Pat Padua

City Lights

City Lights

The past months of isolation have thrown the limitations of humans as individuals into high relief. Living with reduced person-to-person contact highlights our need for it, and forces us to ask ourselves what we’re really doing when we replace friends and family with more screen time. In By Proxy, the first online exhibition from the Arlington Arts Center, seven artists share dispatches from a culture suspended between physical isolation and digital interconnectedness. Some contributed pieces spill off of the AAC’s website and into social media platforms. Jeremy Hutchison’s “Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,” for instance, is a series of letters to Instagram’s owner posted on Instagram. My Husband, a collaborative duo consisting of artists Eliza Doyle and Annika Berry, use Zoom to tell a story about women preparing to emerge from a bunker after a cataclysm. In their piece, titled “SHTF (Shit-Hits-The-Future),” they try to concoct an alternative to the individualistic mindsets of the doomsday preppers who came before, creating a new post-collapse paradigm. Meanwhile, in her piece titled “Habitat Actions,” Mariah Anne Johnson, an artist best known for creating installations from bedsheets and pillowcases, moves through the space of her home to perform seemingly mundane actions in surprising ways. (In a launch event for By Proxy, Johnson said that while making the piece, she asked herself, “What can I do? What’s a possible space to put my body into? I will succeed, or something else will happen.”) The artists of By Proxy will also participate in talks in which participants can ask them questions about their creations and inspirations via Zoom. Follow the Arlington Arts Center on Instagram to watch By Proxy unfold during the summer. The exhibition is available at arlingtonartscenter.org. Free.

—Will Lennon

When many rock fans heard that D.C. singer and guitarist Ian MacKaye was playing in a new band with bassist Joe Lally, his Fugazi bandmate from 1987 to 2003, they expressed hope that they, along with drummer Amy Farina, would sound like that powerful post-punk unit. Others looked back even further and dreamed of the angry-voiced MacKaye in hardcore punk band Minor Threat. My initial impulse was the opposite—I wanted to hear something brand new from this group; different musical influences and singing styles. Coriky’s self-titled debut album, named after a dice game, is not that, but it has grown on me—it’s a comforting amalgamation of the cathartic guitar buzz, sing-songy and shouted vocals, and dub reggae bass of Fugazi with the more relaxed indie-folk of MacKaye and Farina’s 2001-formed duo The Evens. The Ian, Amy, and Joe trio began playing together in 2015 and played their first live gig in 2018. The 2020 album starts off promisingly with the insistent “Clean Kill,” the abstract lyrical tale, apparently, of a drone operator for the military who never has enough “soap and water” to wash away the thoughts of what her buttonpushing is doing. The poppy tunefulness of the chorus contrasts cleverly with MacKaye’s noisy chords and the anxiety of the lyrics. “Have a Cup of Tea” succeeds through juxtaposition as well. Here, MacKaye’s spoken and barked verses alternate with the friendlier chorus sung by MacKaye and Farina overtop Farina’s steady drum pulse & Lally’s minimalist bass rhythms. Other cuts, like “Say Yes,” with Farina’s strong alto vocal melody and MacKaye’s brief guitar solo, are strongly

By Proxy

20 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Coriky

reminiscent of their past, but mostly work due to the musicians’ skill and passion, even if they’re not carving out completely new turf. The album is available on Dischord Records, Bandcamp, and streaming services. Free–$15.

—Steve Kiviat

City Lights

Yuno Baswir: In Peace Yuno Baswir’s paintings teeter compellingly between order and chaos. Baswir, who has a new online and in-person exhibit at Studio Gallery DC, creates his new series of 24 inch by 36 or 48 inch acrylics by painting his canvases flat on a table. Each starts with a steady background color, ranging from royal blue to lavender to lime; Baswir then superimposes that layer with a broad cluster of small, white, circular shapes made by hand using a special tool. The circular shapes are organized in irregular but pleasing patterns that suggest vibrating atoms or television static.

Baswir imbues his paintings with spirituality. “I intentionally and consciously use the act of painting to remember and praise The Most High,” he says. The round shapes were inspired by prayer beads, and by “the look of the gathering of hundreds of thousands of human beings in one place for the one purpose of worshiping and praising their Creator.” The paintings can be seen online at Studio Gallery’s website and the artist’s website, and also in person at the gallery by appointment on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and without appointment on Fridays and Saturdays from 1 to 6 p.m. The exhibition is available at studiogallerydc.com and yunodelwizarbaswir.com. Call (202) 232-8734 for in-person appointments. Free.

—Louis Jacobson

City Lights

Virtually tour the United States Botanic Garden Plants are quite remarkable. They change, adapt, and survive.

Clearly, there’s a lot humans can learn from their green surroundings. The folks at the United States Botanic Garden are choosing to take a leaf out of that book and move their garden experience to the virtual world. To start the online USBG experience, consider lighting your favorite floral candle in the spirit of the garden’s lush smells. Then, begin the 360-degree virtual tour of the gardens via Google Street View. You can start in the outdoor rose gardens, Bartholdi Park, or inside the conservatory. Regardless of where you begin the tour, you’ll get a chance to view plants used for medicine, food, clothing, and so much more. Once you “walk” around, there are plenty of opportunities to dive deeper. An indepth audio tour will take you through the history of the USBG and its outdoor gardens. You’ll learn more about plants that smell like rotten meat, orchid hybrids, and the USBG’s oldest plants—some date all the way back to the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838. Lastly, if you want even more info on the garden, you can conclude your virtual tour with a history-focused photo gallery and watch specific videos about various orchid species and plant morphology. Whether you have a green thumb or kill every houseplant you buy, there’s something here for everyone. Virtual tours of the United States Botanic Garden are available at usbg.gov. Free.

—Sarah Smith

City Lights

Participate in an online eco-art workshop Using vibrant watercolors and geometric forms, Samantha Belilty and Daljeet Kaur create visual arguments for climate change

action. While their studios are located thousands of miles apart— Belilty in D.C. and Kaur in New Delhi—the two artists and activists are joining forces to share their techniques in an online workshop open to planet and art lovers of all experience levels. Belilty explores the beauty and vulnerability of today’s threatened ecosystems by mixing paints with reusable materials like wood, glass, and plastic. One such work in her “Pollination Series” features a harmony of honeycomb shapes and bee silhouettes against a haunting background of turquoise and pollen yellow. Monochromatic skeletons of floating flowers articulate the fragility of nature, inspiring concern and action in viewers. Meanwhile, Kaur’s work conceptualizes the same ethos, but takes a different approach. She paints in the Madhubani style that originated in the Mithila region along the southern border of Nepal and the northern Indian state of Bihar.

Madhubani uses twigs, fingers, matchsticks, and pens to create detailed, colorful patterns with natural dyes and pigments. The scenes typically illustrate people’s relationship to nature, imagery that Kaur expands upon to spread awareness about today’s pressing social issues like global warming. In her “madhURBANi” series, Kaur’s arresting designs communicate the urgency of climate change action in a universal language: candy-colored strokes and constellating shapes. Join them and learn to make your own art grounded in the rhythms and patterns of the earth.

The class begins at 10 a.m. on July 19. Registration is available at ecologicprograms.org. $16.

—Emma Francois

City Lights

Well, Well, Well If the past few months in quarantine have made it hard for you to laugh, you’re not alone. The world around us is shifting tremendously in some ways that are necessary and could potentially lead to a new paradigm in our everyday lives. In the group of unexpected changes we face in work and play, the world of comedy is at the center. Zoom calls have become the new improv stage for virtual stand-up shows, and sometimes, if the audience is just mute enough, comics are just monologuing—which is entirely bad. Grassroots Comedy is striving to be a balm for weary times with their sixth episode of Well, Well, Well, a comedy show where

comics share their deep insights on wellness. In this upcoming episode, comedians act as a conduit for the sustainability of communities around us, compounded with topics of mental and emotional wellness. Proceeds will go to frontline agency Bread for the City, which works to uproot racism and provide food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services to reduce the burden of poverty. Is comedy leading the charge in societal change?

Will comedy save us all? Remains to be seen, but laughing for a cause could be a great start. The show begins at 8 p.m. on July 16.

Registration is available at eventbrite.com. $5 minimum donation.

—Mikala Williams

City Lights

Denise Ho: Becoming The Song Politically active pop star Denise Ho has sacrificed a lot for her ideals. Ho, inspired by stars like Anita Mui in childhood, rose to prominence in Hong Kong with her unique take on Cantopop.

After getting her start in singing contests, Ho became a stadiumscale act who could attract thousands to her concerts, and she made waves when she became the first mega-star in China to come out as a lesbian. Due to her involvement in the Hong Kong pro-democracy protest movement (starting with the Umbrella Movement of 2014, in which Hong Kongers demanded free elections), Ho was restricted from performing in China. After seeing her music banned and her endorsements dry up, she was forced to take her life in a new direction. Denise Ho: Becoming The Song, the new documentary on Ho now streaming via AFI Silver, follows the singer’s journey from stadium-packing superstar to DIY singer. It features gut-wrenching footage of Ho on the streets of Hong Kong, braving tear gas, getting arrested, and negotiating with armored police to protect protesters—and in the halls of power, before the United Nations and the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. With interviews, performance footage, and snippets of the singer’s work as a political activist, the documentary tells the story of both Hong Kong and of Ho becoming an icon for a desperate, daily struggle for democracy.

The film is available to stream at afisilver.com. $12. —Will Lennon washingtoncitypaper.com july 17, 2020 21

DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE

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My wife asked me to write to you about our situation. We’ve been married for fifteen years. I am 50 years old and my wife is a decade younger.

We are a heterosexual couple with kids. I am a submissive male and I like to play with my ass using different-sized dildos. I enormously enjoy being penetrated with sex toys. A few years ago I introduced the idea of a FLR—female-led relationship—to my wife and she accepted it. We are a happy couple! My wife is more on the traditional side of sex and I respect that. We have PIV sex twice a week and I try to give her pleasure as much as I can. Looks like everything is OK, right? But recently she complained that I have stopped ejaculating when we have sex. And it’s true: When we engage in vaginal penetration, I no longer ejaculate. I like it this way because I don’t lose my sex drive and I can continue. But she doesn’t like it. For her my ejaculate is the “cherry on top” of the sex and my coming during sex is important for her pleasure and satisfaction. My wife thinks that I stopped ejaculating because I developed the habit of pleasuring myself with dildos and butt plugs in the shower.

She thinks the toys are distracting me. Do you think it’s true? If that’s the case, what should we do? I love my wife, but I also love my butt plugs and dildos.

—Spouse Unpleased By Husband’s Un Blasts You should come in your wife.

If your wife is in charge—you proposed a “female-led relationship” and she accepted— then she gets to give the orders and you’re supposed to do what she says, within reason, of course. So when she says, “Come in me,” you should say, “How high up your vaginal canal would you like me to come?”

Even if you weren’t in a female-led relationship, SUBHUB, refusing to come in your wife when you know feeling you come inside her is important to her pleasure is a weirdly literal kind of withholding behavior. And considering how GGG your wife has been, SUBHUB, refusing to come in her so you can “continue,” presumably without her, isn’t something a loving submissive would do. It’s something a selfish asshole does.

Your wife doubtless suspects the same thing I do: You aren’t coming in her because you’d rather blow your load in the shower. She sees you when you slip out of bed to go cram sex toys in your ass and blow your load down the drain instead of finishing in her. And if that’s what you’re doing—and I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re doing—then you’re treating PIV sex with your wife as foreplay and the time you spend alone with your ass toys as the main event. If I were your wife, SUBHUB, I would find that annoying, too. And however much you love your plugs and dildos, I would hope you love your wife more. At any rate, you aren’t submissive to your plugs and dildos—you’re submissive to your wife, who isn’t made of silicone and who has needs and feelings that have to be taken into account.

At the very least, SUBHUB, your wife’s pleasure should be your first priority during PIV sex. And it’s not like you can’t combine PIV with a little butt play. You can always

22 july 17, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

shove one of your beloved plugs in your ass before you have PIV sex with the wife. And if you didn’t refrain from ejaculating every single time you had PIV, SUBHUB, if it was something you were allowed to do once in a while with your wife’s permission, she might be willing to accommodate your desire every tenth time you have PIV. —Dan Savage I am a 53-year-old guy. Since I’ve been struggling with depression and anxiety all my life, I’ve never been in a situation where sex was a possibility. I’m really dying to know what it’s like. I’ve gotten much better over the years and the women who know me think the world of me.

But they aren’t in a position to help me out.

Other women seem to want someone much more

“VR porn sounds like a great way for an adventurous monogamous couple to have a little virtual variety, whether that couple is monogamous by choice or monogamous for the duration of this stupid pandemic.” outgoing and confident than I am or ever will be.

Confidence comes from experience and I don’t have any. My one girlfriend could not hide the fact that my inexperience offended her. Other people on blogs and such have recommended a prostitute. But that’s not really what I’m looking for. It’s about more than sex. I want someone to care for me as I am. Is there hope for me? Or has the world just left me behind?

—Very Inexperienced Relationship Guy In Need I know it’s not what you want to hear, VIRGIN, but I agree with other blogs and such: I think you should find a sex worker. Find a nice, patient woman who does sex work and be completely upfront about why you’re seeing her: You’re so painfully self-conscious about your sexual inexperience you find it hard to date. It may take some searching, VIRGIN, but there are sex workers who want to help their clients grow and heal. “Many people have the stereotypical misconception that all sex workers are disconnected, uncaring, and only there for the

money,” said Ruby Ryder, a sex worker and sex educator. “While money is indeed a part of it, many of us understand that human beings need touch, connection, and acceptance. We provide an opportunity for clients to be vulnerable, whether it’s fulfilling their kinky fantasies or simply having sex.” And while the relationship you have with a sex worker you might see regularly for a year or two is certainly transactional, VIRGIN, it’s still a relationship and about more than sex.

I’m not suggesting you see sex workers exclusively for the rest of your life (even if I’m not not suggesting that either), VIRGIN, I’m only suggesting you see a sex worker to find out what sex is like, gain a little self-confidence, and maybe feel a little more hopeful for your future.

Ruby Ryder is on Twitter @Ruby_Ryder and online at www.peggingparadise.com.

—DS I’m a longtime reader who’s never had a question that your archives couldn’t answer. But there is something I wanted to share with you and your readers! My wife and I have incorporated virtual reality (VR) goggles into our sex life with great success, Dan, and they could be the answer to a range of questions that you get in the column. They’re so useful, in fact, that your failure to mention them is starting to look like a glaring omission! Because let’s say someone writes in who wants to open their relationship or explore a cuckold fantasy (like one of last week’s letter writers) but they’re worried about the emotions involved, potential STIs, or COVID-19? VR goggles! While the offerings for female POV VR porn are pretty paltry, I’ve never seen my wife come harder than she did with me inside her and a pair of goggles on her face giving her the perspective of a man getting fucked by a beautiful trans woman. I love the idea that this turns her on and I actually think she looks hot with goggles on! Besides the cost of a subscription to a VR porn site, the financial barrier is really pretty low—most people can use their smartphone and a $20 headset to get started, which is much cheaper than seeing a sex worker and much less time consuming than engineering a consenting affair. And there’s no risk of STIs or COVID-19! Just wanted you to consider VR as a possibly overlooked tool for your otherwise always outstanding advice in the future!

—Very Recent Purchase Optimizes Reality Nicely Thank you for writing in, VRPORN, and you’re right: VR porn sounds like a great way for an adventurous monogamous couple to have a little virtual variety, whether that couple is monogamous by choice or monogamous for the duration of this stupid pandemic. In addition to the technology, of course, you’ll need a partner who not only knows you fantasize about other people (like they do, like everybody does), but who’s also excited about helping you explore those fantasies. Thanks again for sharing, VRPORN! —DS Email your Savage Love questions to mail@savagelove.net

CLASSIFIEDS Legal THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSING AUTHORITY REQUEST FOR QUALIFICATIONS (RFQ) SOLICITATION NO.: 00232020 BASELINE SERVICE PROVIDER The District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) is accepting applications for Baseline Service Providers for services available throughout various DCHA properties.

SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS will be available on DCHA’s website at www.dchousing.org under “Business” and “Solicitations” beginning Monday, July 13, 2020.

DCHA will accept proposals on a rolling quarterly basis, beginning August 2020 through November 2021 for as long as DCHA has capacity.

SEALED PROPOSAL RESPONSES ARE DUE ON OR BEFORE 12:00 p.m. noon on the first Thursday of the quarter as follows: Thursday, August 13, 2020 Thursday, November 5, 2020 Thursday, February 4, 2021 Thursday, May 6, 2021 Thursday, August 5, 2021 Thursday, November 4, 2021 Email LaShawn MizzellMcLeod, Contract Specialist at LMMCLEOD@ dchousing.org with copy to business@dchousing.org for inquiries or additional information.

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSING AUTHORITY REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS (RFP) SOLICITATION NO.: 0013-2020 ABATEMENT/LEAD RENOVATION, REPAIR AND PAINTING (RRP) SERVICES The District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) requires certified and professional firms to provide Abatement and Lead RRP services throughout various DCHA properties.

SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS will be available on DCHA’s website at www.dchousing.org under “Business” and “Solicitations” beginning Monday, July 13,2020.

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SUMMONS CASE NO.: FN2020-000770 SUPERIOR COURT OF ARIZONA IN MARICOPA COUNTY Jorge A Ascencio Name of Petitioner / Party A And Suyapa A Ascencio Name of Respondent / Party B WARNING: This is an official document from the court that affects your rights. Read this carefully. If you do not understand it, contact a lawyer for help.

FROM THE STATE OF ARIZONA TO: Suyapa A Ascencio 1. A lawsuit has been filed against you. A copy of the lawsuit and other court papers are served on you with this “Summons.”

2. If you do not want a judgment or order entered against you without your input, you must file a written “Answer” or a “Response” with the court, and pay the filing fee. Also, the other party may be granted their request by the Court if you do not file an “Answer” or “Response”, or show up in court. To file your “Answer” or “Response” take, or send, it to the: Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 201 West Jefferson Street, Phoenix, Arizona 850032205 OR Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 18380 North 40th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85032 OR Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 222 East Javelina Avenue, Mesa, Arizona 85210-6201 OR Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, 14264 West Tierra Buena Lane, Surprise, Arizona 85374.

After filing, mail a copy of your “Response” or “Answer” to the other party at their current address.

3. If this “Summons” and the other court papers were served on you by a registered process server or the Sheriff within the

State of Arizona, your “Response” or “Answer” must be filed within TWENTY (20) CALENDAR DAYS from the date you were served, not counting the day you were served.

If you were served by “Acceptance of Service” within the State of Arizona, your “Response” or “Answer” must be filed within TWENTY (20) CALENDAR DAYS from the date that the “Acceptance of Service was filed withthe Clerk of Superior Court. If this “Summons” and the other papers were served on you by a registered process server or the Sheriff outside the State of Arizona, your Response must be filed within THIRTY (30) CALENDAR DAYS from the date you were served, not counting the day you were served. If you were served by “Acceptance of Service” outside the State of Arizona, your “Response” or “Answer” must be filed within THIRTY (30) CALENDAR DAYS from the date that the “Acceptance of Service was filed with the Clerk of Superior Court. Service by a registered process server or the Sheriff is complete when made.

Service by Publication is complete thirty(30) days after the date of the first publication.

4. You can get a copy of the court papers filed in this case from the Petitioner at the address listed at the top of the preceding page, or from the Clerk of Superior Court’sCustomer Service Center at: 601 West Jackson, Phoenix, Arizona 85003 or 18380 North 40th Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85032 or 222 East Javelina Avenue, Mesa, Arizona 85210 or 14264 West Tierra Buena Lane, Surprise, Arizona 85374.

5. If this is an action for dissolution (divorce), legal separation or annulment, either or both spouses may file a Petition for Conciliation for the purpose of determining whether there is any mutual interest in preserving the marriage or for Mediation to attempt to settle disputes concerning legal decisionmaking (legal custody) and parenting time issues regarding minor children.

6. Requests for reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities must be made to the division assigned to the case by the party needing accommodation or his/her counsel at least three (3) judicial days in advance of a scheduled proceeding.

7. Requests for an interpreter for persons with limited English proficiency must be made to the division assigned to the case by the party needing the interpreter and/ or translator or his/her counsel at least ten (10) judicial days in advance of a scheduled court proceeding.

SIGNED AND SEALED this date FEB 05 2020 CLERK OF SUPERIOR COURT

By M. PATTERSON Deputy Clerk of Superior Court 7/10, 7/17, 7/24, 7/31/20

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