Washington City Paper (Aug. 20, 2021)

THE DISTRICT’S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 41, NO. 8 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM AUGUST 2021

NEWS: THE FIGHT TO FIX DC HEALTHCARE ALLIANCE 4 CLIMATE: MAPPING D.C.’s HEAT ISLANDS 10 ARTS: A NEW DOC ABOUT AN OLD PERFORMANCE SPACE 26

Play Dough An NCAA rule change allows amateur college athletes to make money off their name, image, and likeness. Those with local ties are preparing to profit.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 18 Play Dough Thanks to a new NCAA policy, college athletes can earn money off their names, images, and likenesses. They’re endorsing everything from restaurants to skincare products.

NEWS 4 Loose Lips: Reforming the onerous requirements of a health care program used by many undocumented people is easier said than done.

6 Alarming Trend: Residents are still dying in house fires despite the existence of a free smoke detector installation program.

10 Too Darn Hot: D.C.’s heat islands, where the hottest temperatures are recorded, can be dangerous places for those who live and work there.

14 Recorder’s Notebook: The people chronicling local crime on social media accounts say they’re doing a public service.

ARTS 26 Whose Stories Get Told: A former performance space and center of queer Black life in D.C. is remembered and celebrated in a new documentary.

30 Eastern Artket: Meet the artist making it through the pandemic by connecting with his patrons.

32 Books: Guay on Kat Chow’s Seeing Ghosts 33 Film: Zilberman on The Night House

CITY LIGHTS 34 City Lights: Go back to the future at Awesome Con, take in some puppet shows, and check out the names behind D.C. streets.

DIVERSIONS 37 Crossword 38 Savage Love 39 Classifieds On the cover: Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

Darrow Montgomery | 1600 Block of Newton Street NW, August 14 Editorial

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washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 3

DC Health Annoyance

Darrow Montgomery/File

NEWS LOOSE LIPS

Another budget cycle goes by without removing barriers to health care for undocumented immigrants in D.C.

By Mitch Ryals @MitchRyals By some accounts, Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray is in a slump. Over the past five months, Gray has lost a handful of hotly debated legislative efforts.

He’s twice tried and failed to stop a halfway house from opening in his ward. He carried water for Mayor Muriel Bowser’s unsuccessful efforts to meddle in a lucrative Medicaid contract. Along the way, he accused his fellow councilmembers of contract steering, and they returned the favor. In May, Gray asked his Council colleagues to pour more money into United Medical Center to avoid triggering a financial control board—a board that he himself created (with agreement from the rest of the Council) by reducing the cap on the subsidy D.C. provides to keep the hospital running. A narrow majority of councilmembers were unwilling to bail him and the hospital out.

As the D.C. Council finalized the 2022 budget, Gray whiffed again—this time in his yearslong quest to fully fix a problem with the D.C. Healthcare Alliance. The locally funded program provides health insurance for more than 15,000 low-income immigrants who don’t qualify for Medicaid, many of whom are undocumented.

For the past decade, D.C. has required Alliance enrollees to reapply for their health insurance in person every six months.

Applicants would line up outside Department of Human Services locations as early as 3 or 4 a.m. to get appointments. About 600 to 700 people, roughly half of those up for recertification each month, fail to do so and lose their coverage, an effect of the requirement to reapply in person twice a year, advocates say. The onerous chore does not apply to traditional DC Medicaid applicants, who renew their coverage once a year.

The recently passed 2022 Budget Support Act does include some reforms to the Alliance program. But major changes don’t fully kick in until 2025. Alliance enrollees are currently still required to reapply every six months from now through September 2022, but won’t have to do so in person. From October 2022 until 2025,

Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray

enrollees may complete only one of their two required reapplications in person. After March of 2025, they will only have to reapply once a year, but may have to go in person. First-time applicants are still required to register in person, according to Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage.

During the public health emergency, Bowser allowed Alliance enrollees to keep their health insurance without reapplying. The public health emergency ended in July, but a general public emergency remains in place through Oct. 8.

Damon King, director of policy advocacy at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, believes the Council’s failure to build on Bowser’s pandemic-induced policy marks another lost opportunity. And Bowser shares some of the blame, King says.

“The administration has now had six years to fix this,” he says. “They did inherit the policy, but having inherited it and having heard testimony … year after year, they’ve had ample opportunity to address this on their own, and they’ve declined to do so.”

Gray sees the incremental changes to the Alliance as progress, according to a staffer familiar with his thinking. He pushes back against the notion of a legislative losing streak.

“In the Fiscal Year 2022 budget, we secured significant investments for Ward 7, Birth-toThree, and citywide health equity,” Gray says in an emailed statement. Among the highlights he included: $1.9 million for school-based

4 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

mental health services expansion, $365.9 million toward building a new health care system east of the Anacostia River, nearly $127 million toward fair pay for child care workers, and $24 million for the Deanwood Library.

What is a simple solution to a major problem with Alliance has been complicated over the years, as lawmakers tripped over each other to fix it. A clusterfuck of legislation passed since 2017, a lack of funding, and what Gray believes is an overestimation by the CFO of the total cost of reforms have stood in the way.

Meanwhile, Alliance enrollees such as Selene Lara, who have had to line up outside DHS locations at ungodly hours just to keep their health insurance, are once again left waiting for reforms sought for the past decade.

Twice a year for the past eight years, Lara has stood in line before sunrise to apply to keep her health insurance. She recalls one particularly hellish rendezvous about three years ago.

It was January, the dead of winter, and she and her partner arrived at the DHS building on New York Avenue NE around 5 a.m.

Others were already waiting, she recalls. They brought their own chairs.

Lara, 30, had her then-3-month-old daughter in tow. It was so cold that she and her partner took turns waiting with the infant in a nearby Starbucks while the other held their place in line. They weren’t let into the building until 8 a.m., she recalls. When it was her turn to see a caseworker, her daughter started

to cry. The caseworker became angry and refused to help them until the infant quieted down, Lara says. She tried everything—talking, singing, rocking. At one point, her partner stood up to walk around, but the caseworker said he couldn’t leave the cubicle.

“It was really upsetting and sad,” says Lara, who is now a community health worker for La Clínica del Pueblo. “It’s a service that you need. Like, oh my god, I understand why people don’t come here. They really don’t care. At that point, I was crying.”

When the caseworker finally processed their application, Lara says she was told she was missing documentation and needed to come back. She says she had to return five more times before she was able to complete the process. On one visit, the system was down, so caseworkers couldn’t enter her information, Lara says. During another appointment, a caseworker entered her income incorrectly.

Rodrigo Stein, La Clínica’s director of health equity and community partnerships, says Lara’s experience is not unique.

Lara speaks f luent English, but many Alliance enrollees don’t, Stein says. Clients report that caseworkers rarely speak Spanish, and though DHS has translation services, they’re not always available, Stein says, and they’re sometimes ineffective.

“We still have technology barriers, waiting a long time over the phone, and poorly translated documents,” Stein says. Enrollees “have to ask landlords for proof of residence.

NEWS LOOSE LIPS Imagine doing that twice a year. Lots of immigrant residences are doubling up, so they’re not necessarily signing a lease. It’s an excessive amount of documentation for an assistance program that should be [recertified] yearly like Medicaid.”

“There’s no reason for the Alliance to have a different level of scrutiny unless you see it through a lens of ‘we can’t trust the people applying for this,’” he says.

Alliance enrollees, by definition, don’t earn a lot of money. To qualify, residents cannot earn more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which is currently $2,818 a month for a two-person household. Many clients are hourly workers, Stein says. They must take unpaid time off work twice a year to reapply—more often if they don’t have all the right paperwork.

“Many people go without health insurance during the renewal process,” he says, including insulin users and those who are pregnant.

The barriers that Stein and King want removed were erected in 2011, at the beginning of then-Mayor Vince Gray’s administration. A staffer in Gray’s Council office explains that concerns about nonresidents enrolling in the program prompted the in-person reapplication requirements. D.C. was facing a budget gap of more than $322 million at

the time. Requiring proof of residency every six months removed people from the program and lowered the cost.

King, who has been pushing for removal of those requirements since 2017 (his organization has been pushing for far longer), hasn’t seen nonresidents in the program.

“I don’t think that has been our experience when it comes to working with folks who need healthcare through this program,” he says. “I think the policy is a draconian response to that concern.”

The Council started its efforts to reverse the policy in 2017. A confusing puzzle of bills passed since then amended and reamended each other. Though the bills that will change the process are legally approved, some are “subject to appropriation,” meaning they don’t go into effect until the Council dedicates funds to implement them.

Therein lies the problem. Over the years, the CFO’s office has projected the cost of removing the recertification requirements at anywhere from $59 million to $105 million over the District’s four-year budget plan—not pocket change. The projections are based on the number of people expected to remain in the program if the stringent recertification requirements are lifted.

In a budget work session this cycle, Gray

said he disagrees with the CFO’s estimates.

But he still had to work within them. Through the Committee on Health, which he chairs, Gray proposed cutting more than 100 positions across three agencies to meet the approximately $59 million price tag for Alliance reforms.

Some of the positions Gray proposed cutting will support the District’s shift away from police response to emergencies, as well as mental health services in public schools. The recommendations did not sit well with pretty much anybody.

A t- L a r g e C o u n c i l m e m b e r E l i s s a Silverman said the cuts amount to a “gimmick,” and “are contrary to our goals of building a health equitable city.” At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson asked simply, “What are we doing?” In a letter sent to the Council ahead of the budget votes, Bowser called Gray’s recommendations “reckless,” and said that they threaten critical programs.

Gray’s original recommendation wasn’t approved. The Council ultimately passed a budget that requires enrollees to recertify every six months, but doesn’t require them to do it in person. Starting in April 2025, enrollees only need to reapply once a year, but they may be required to do so in person. Gray also created a fund that will collect unspent money in

the Department of Healthcare Finance’s budget in the coming years and direct it toward Alliance reforms.

Although King believes full reforms should come sooner than 2025, he gives Gray and Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who has also worked on the issue, credit for their persistence. He notes that the budget process hampers legislators’ ability to fund expensive projects. Councilmembers must largely work within the budgets for the cluster of agencies under their respective committees.

If an issue is high profile enough, legislators will move funding back and forth between their committees. But for programs that serve populations that are less visible or have less leverage, like the Alliance, it’s difficult to find money for big changes.

Turnage is beginning an 18-month study to determine how keeping the six-month reapplication requirement, but eliminating the inperson requirement, impacts enrollment. The results will help inform the projected costs of permanently removing barriers.

“It’s a situation in which this policy has been allowed to persist far longer than appropriate,” King says. “It really comes down to policy makers making the commitment to find the funds for it.”

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12:28:37 PM washingtoncitypaper.com 7/1/2021 august 2021 5

NEWS DISTRICT LINE

Alarming Trend

By Amanda Williams Contributing Writer The beeping started around 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 25.

Tucked into an upstairs bedroom, Stanley and Louise Butler were fast asleep. Their 11-year-old grandson, Sekai, was sleeping just down the hall.

When those three exaggerated beeps echoed throughout the house, a high-pitched cacophony was able to rouse the deepest of sleepers.

“I could hear my husband saying, ‘There’s smoke, there’s smoke, I can’t breathe,’” says retired teacher Louise Butler, 67. “We all met in the hallway and we linked arms and we came down the stairs. The smoke was just billowing up at us. Once we got to the door, we were able to unlock it and go out, but it was frightening. It was horrific.”

Following the route Sekai had mapped for his Boy Scout first responder badge, the three escaped the house, led by retired Reverend Stanley Butler, 64. The fire started with a space heater in the sunroom of their brick colonial on Alabama Avenue SE, but it didn’t stay there.

Thick smoke quickly spread to every room in the house.

The tinkling of broken glass joined the chorus of beeps as flames shot through heat-shattered windows. Louise thinks the smoke alarm is the only reason they made it out the door at all.

“Had that smoke alarm not alerted us, that fire would have been at the door. It would have been right where we would have gone out,” she says. “The fire was coming fast and furious.”

By the time fire crews arrived, f lames were pouring out of third-story windows.

Firefighters stood on the sunroom roof, shooting water into the floors above. Officials said three firefighters were later treated for minor injuries.

The fire destroyed the Butlers’ home, leaving them with little more than what they were wearing.

“We are just so blessed that we were able to get out of there with the clothes on our backs,” Louise says.

Nine District residents have died in house fires this year, including an 8-year-old boy and an elderly couple. Despite a decade-old program to install and update smoke alarms for free, only five of the eight homes where these fires occurred had smoke alarms, according to data from D.C. Fire and EMS. “Smoke detectors are critical and they definitely save lives,” says D.C. Fire Marshal and Deputy Chief Mitch Kannry, who leads fire prevention efforts for the District. “We do

Darrow Montgomery

Despite the existence of a free smoke alarm program, District residents are still dying in house fires without basic early-warning systems.

The exterior of Stanley and Louise Butler’s home on Alabama Avenue SE

know without a smoke detector, the chances of survival are impacted because you don’t have that early warning should something minor start.”

A February 2021 study from the National Fire Protection Association examined home fire deaths from 2014 to 2018 and found that nearly three out of five were caused by fires in homes without functioning smoke alarms. The study suggests that a person is 55 percent less likely to die in a house fire if that house has a working smoke detector.

The D.C. Fire Prevention Team is currently targeting this problem with the A’sia Sutton Smoke Alarm Giveaway and Installation Program. Named for 5-year-old A’sia Sutton, who died in a 2007 fire in a home without working smoke alarms, the program sends fire department personnel into homes to install and service smoke alarms for free.

According to data from FEMS, the department has installed almost 700 detectors so far this fiscal year, which ends in September. That is on par with the 863 installed in 2019 and well

6 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

above the 345 installed in 2018.

For the 2020 fiscal year, which includes the early months of the pandemic and a brief pause in the program, the department only installed 148 total smoke alarms.

But FEMS’ stock of alarms still exceeds the number of requests and completed installations. Pepco donates around 1,000 smoke alarms annually to area fire departments, according to company spokesperson Jamie Caswell. Caswell says FEMS has received 16,750 devices over the past 16 years.

Around 2,000 of those detectors are sitting in a storage closet, Kannry says.

“I would love for our inventory to be much lower and to get these detectors where they can be used the most,” Kannry says. “We do installations based on request primarily, so if we don’t have the requests coming in, we can’t do those installations.”

The National Fire Protection Association recommends replacing smoke alarms every 10 years and replacing batteries every six months.

Some newer models have built-in batteries that

last 10 years.

Kannry says the devices FEMS installs sometimes sit in storage for a year or two before landing in a home.

“Even if a detector is two years old, if we can still get eight years out of that, that’s still a large coverage area,” Kannry says. “And if it expires in eight years, we’d be more than happy to come out in eight years and put another one in.”

Homeowners can request free smoke alarms by calling 311 in the District or contacting the fire prevention division directly.

Smoke detectors are also installed during broader community outreach events, which Kannry credits with boosting the department’s 2021 installation numbers. Last year, the prevention team began targeting different neighborhoods each month to install smoke alarms and preach fire safety.

They also intensify outreach in any neighborhood where a fatal fire has occurred.

Of the eight homes where fatal fires occurred this year, investigators have

Stay or Sell? The 5 Things Every DC Homeowner Needs to Know Right Now Written by Jonas Sterling McGaha, Founder, The Sterling Group

The DC real estate market has been breaking historic records in 2021, with listing and offer prices at all-time highs and inventory volume and time on market at all-time lows.

The District has never seen anything quite like the current market, leaving homeowners wondering if now is the time to sell or if they're better off waiting for the market to calm.

Any DC homeowner on the fence about selling now should consider the following five factors before making their decision.

1) Fall is one of the best times to sell August and September can be a bit slow on the DC real estate market. Sellers are competing against the sweltering heat, summer vacation plans, an influx of tourists chasing locals away, and back-to-school chaos. But every year, the market turns upward as the area heads into the pleasant autumn season.

According to the real estate data firm Homelight, October is the best month of the year to sell your house fast in DC. But that window of opportunity in the autumn closes quickly, as the December through March period becomes the slowest time of the year for DC house sales.

Homeowners who wish to sell need to start the listing process now so their house can be on the market during that coveted October timeframe. If you miss the October listing window, you risk being stuck on the market during the winter months, when both DC and its housing market are ice cold.

2) Record low mortgage rates are ending Low mortgage rates help new buyers afford houses, pushing them into the market sooner and allowing them to buy bigger homes. According to Long and Foster, the mortgage on a $600K house would be $1500 less per month today than it was in 2000, thanks just to low interest rates.

Millennials, the largest generation in American history, have been slow to become homeowners due to economic recessions, stagnant wages, and heavy student loan debt. But thanks to low mortgage rates and improved savings during COVID, Millennials have recently been flooding into the market as first-time buyers.

The entry of these younger folks into the market has been like a shot of adrenaline for the housing market, helping to spur the recent market rise.

But all good things must come to an end, and

according to Forbes, "the end of the housing boom will be when mortgage rates rise." These "rates are likely to rise when financial markets anticipate more inflation and action by the Federal Reserve to stem inflation."

Thanks to multiple rounds of COVID-related economic stimulus, America is at risk of rising inflation. The Labor Department recently announced that consumer prices jumped another 5% in July, the largest jump since 2008. Earlier this year, inflation rates were at a higher level (4%) than mortgage rates (3%), an economic statistic that has not been seen since 1980.

The Federal Reserve combats inflation by increasing interest rates. With the current Fed rate around zero percent and inflation on the rise, there is nowhere for the Fed to go with interest rates except up. When the Fed raises interest rates, mortgage rates will increase along with it, homes will become less affordable, and the housing market will cool.

DC Realtor Angela Allison agrees: "It's smart to get on market while the rates are so low. The rates are going to go up, they have to go up, and we're going to start to see a turn in buyer demand. It's so crazy how this market turns on a dime - it can shift that much, that quick. Get on now, because we really don't know what's going to happen in the fall."

3) The supply of homes is rising One well-known impact of an item being in low supply and high demand is that the price of that item rises. The price continues to rise until it reaches a point where even the most enthusiastic and motivated buyer says, "Yeah, I'm not paying that much." Or, as is often the

case in home buying, mortgage underwriters say "Yeah, we're not cutting a check this big for that house."

According to data from the Federal Reserve Board, the housing market held just 3.5 months worth of inventory in October 2020, the lowest amount of inventory in history. During 2021, the amount of inventory has been steadily rising, and as of June, 6.3 months worth of inventory are on the market. This rising supply means more options for buyers, weakening the seller's market of the past year, and it counts as another sign that the market is starting to cool.

A looming foreclosure surge is also on the horizon. Right now, mortgage forbearances and bans on evictions and foreclosures have been keeping the supply of low-priced foreclosures off the market. These safety nets will be ending soon, and homeowners who have already walked away from their homes or who have suffered a long-term loss of income will be headed towards short sales and foreclosure auctions.

When the pent-up foreclosure supply is finally released, buyers will have even more options to choose from, and traditional sellers may have to start lowering prices to stay competitive.

Finally, after taking a pause due to COVID and skyrocketing lumber prices, the new home construction industry is expected to have a busy year. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) predicts that 1.1 million new homes will be built in 2021, a rate not seen since 2007. According to Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, "Most large builders have record or near record backlogs of new homes under contract and waiting to be built." These new homes will also add to the rising supply of houses.

With the supply of homes rising quickly, homeowners who delay putting their homes up for sale are at risk of having their listings get lost in the middle of a deluge of competing properties flooding the market. Instead, the seller's goal should be to enter the market before the anticipated spike in housing supply.

4) COVID is ending Today's hot market was sparked by the COVID pandemic. Fears of the virus kept buyers and sellers in lockdown, and that pent-up demand finally exploded once COVID restrictions were relaxed. The COVID-related economic stimulus drove down mortgage rates, making homes more affordable.

In addition, the increase in working from home has caused homeowners to rethink how many rooms they need, where they want to live, and what kind of house they could buy with their budget. The media has labeled this phenomenon "The Great Re-Shuffling." Being able to work from home has caused an unprecedented exit from cities as buyers seek bigger

homes at cheaper prices in the suburbs.

With DC vaccination rates approaching 70%, and President Joe Biden pushing federal employees to get vaccinated, the DC area should be able to weather the recent storm caused by the COVID Delta variant. Schools are expected to open up on 8/30, allowing many parents to return to the workforce, and unemployment is expected to continue to drop.

Given this positive economic outlook, certain Congressmen have said they do not expect any more federal stimulus.

All of this means that the pandemic is coming to an end, and life should start to look like the so-called "old normal" again. This also is likely to mean a return to the old normal in the housing market, with prices dropping over the winter back to the range of pre-COVID levels.

Any homeowners thinking about selling should jump into the market now, before COVID and its pumped-up housing prices come to an end.

5) The DC market is hot right now The DC area is currently under an Excessive Heat Weather Warning as the heat index reaches a sticky 110 degrees, approaching an all-time record.

The DC real estate market is just as hot as the recent weather: • DC home prices have reached a median home price of $700K, which is an all-time record and up 12% from last year.

• DC had 1,123 closed sales last month, which is a 10-year high and up 23% from the norm.

• DC homes sat on the market for only 7 days also a 10-year record.

The above numbers show we are still in a strong "seller's market". All signs point to these record market highs continuing for another few months, but it is unlikely the market peak will survive the cold DC winter.

Winter is Coming Homeowners on the fence about selling should make a decision quickly because the upcoming October peak buying season may be the last hurrah for this hot market. If you miss this autumn window, you may be waiting until spring to sell.

It's unclear what the market conditions will be like this coming spring. Mortgage rates will probably be up, the supply of houses will likely be high due to foreclosures and new construction coming into inventory, and COVID will hopefully be behind us.

All of these factors are likely to be a drag on the DC housing market, meaning spring sellers may not be able to profit from the best prices the DC area has ever seen.

S P O N S O R E D S T O RY F R O M S T E R L I N G R E A LT Y G R O U P | W W W. S T E R L I N G R E A LT Y G R O U P. C O /

washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 7

confirmed two had working smoke alarms.

While three homes had alarms installed, investigators haven’t determined if they were functioning at the time of the fires. Three homes had no detectors at all.

A task force that includes representatives from FEMS, the Metropolitan Police Department, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigate every fatal fire in the city. Kannry says that electrical engineers from ATF are still evaluating the smoke alarms present during the May 24 fire that killed 8-year-old Supreme Arant to determine if they were working properly at the time.

Arant was staying with relatives when the fire broke out. Kannry says he was rescued but died in the hospital several days later. Three adults and two other children who were home at the time escaped.

“When we’re doing our outreach, we do think it makes more impact knowing that it was a child that died,” Kannry says. “All fire deaths are a tragedy, and we don’t want anyone to die in a fire but especially when it’s a child impacted, everybody feels it a little bit more.”

Inspectors installed 23 new smoke alarms while canvassing in Deanwood, around Upsal Street SE, where the fire that killed Arant occurred.

After George Washington University professor Paul Tschudi, 73, and his dog died in a house fire on April 7, the team canvassed in Brookland and installed nine smoke alarms in homes. Inspectors did not find any working smoke alarms in Tschudi’s home, according to FEMS data.

Kannry still believes the program is working, despite the recent spate of deaths in homes without alarms.

“I think that we’ve been able to install a lot of smoke detectors in homes that otherwise wouldn’t be able to have them,” Kannry says.

“If just one of those smoke detectors is able to prevent a small fire from escalating or prevent a fire death, I think that the whole program was worthwhile.”

Although the free smoke alarm program targeted low-income and elderly homeowners early on, Kannry says any homeowner in the District can request an installation and a fire safety inspection.

Landlords are responsible for keeping up to code with working smoke detectors in rental units. While FEMS won’t install smoke alarms in rentals, he says inspectors will evaluate any rental apartment for free and ensure the landlord updates anything unsafe.

Since 2000, the District has averaged nearly 10 fire deaths each year. The city has seen a decade of below-average totals beginning in 2010, but fatalities have been trending upward again in the past three years. Kannry didn’t have an explanation for the uptick but says that 2021 is on track to see above-average numbers.

All of those who died in fires without smoke alarms in 2021 were above the age of 60.

People over 60 have accounted for half of all

Darrow Montgomery

NEWS DISTRICT LINE

Six months after the fire, the Butlers’ home remains boarded up. fire deaths in the District since 2001. People over 70 have accounted for a third and 10 percent have been children under 12, according to FEMS data.

Kannry says children and older adults are most at risk of dying in a fire, often because of mobility issues. FEMS spokesperson Vito Maggiolo added that the elderly are at a higher risk of having defunct smoke alarms, too.

“In some of these fires, it’s not just a matter of smoke detectors not being present, but often they are present but nonfunctioning,” Maggiolo says. “For the elderly, the smoke detector may have been put on the wall 10 years ago and it’s no longer operative, or it may have gone off while cooking dinner and they took the battery out and they didn’t think to put it back.”

Rosa, 87, and Lester Wilson, 91, didn’t have any smoke alarms installed in their Petworth home, according to fire investigators. In the early hours of Jan. 21, a massive fire overtook their two-story rowhouse on 8th Street NW. Both were rushed to the hospital in critical condition but died later that morning. “[Rosa] was a very beautiful spirit; she always helped people and encouraged people in the community,” says Shrikant Bhatnagar, who knew the Wilsons from the

8 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Salvation Army where they worshipped. “This kind of thing doesn’t come in our mind at all, especially smoke alarms, in the D.C. area because we assume everybody, especially in D.C., has one.”

Bhatnagar and his wife, Indrani, are corps officers for the Sherman Avenue NW location.

He says the community was in shock when they heard about the fire. But he hasn’t heard a discussion about the lack of smoke detectors happening in the broader community.

When asked if the city should be doing more to reach residents like the Wilsons with their fire safety education, Indrani says she thinks it starts with the homeowner and the community.

“As a community, we need to take care of each other more, especially when we have so many of these situations already,” she says.

“We need to talk to each other to find out that our home is safe, our smoke detector is working properly, even if we have one that is working.”

FEMS spokesperson Maggiolo also hopes that the community will step up.

“If you’re a friend or a neighbor or a relative of an elderly person … take the time to visit,” he says. “Take the time to see if they have smoke detectors. Take the time to test the smoke detectors, and if they’re needed, let us know and we’ll take care of it for you.”

Louise Butler is surprised that anyone wouldn’t have smoke detectors.

“I just can’t imagine,” she says. “We are here today because the smoke detector saved our lives and it’s just unbelievable that people don’t take that as extremely important.”

The fire is a constant presence in the back of her mind, returning to her in little moments.

She was jumpy for a while. She kept thinking she was constantly smelling smoke when there wasn’t any. A neighbor set up a GoFundMe to crowdfund the family’s recovery process.

Once they were finally let back in to assess the damage, she saw how close it had been.

Smoke damage saturated the walls and window frames were charred reminders of what used to be.

“It was more terrifying when we went back in [the house] and just looked at how fast that fire had burned the entryway, the way we came out,” she says. “Had it not been for the smoke alarm, it would have been another way. ... We lost everything in the fire. There was nothing salvageable, that tells you how fast it spread.”

Louise knows that her perspective has changed since the fire. Now she sees smoke alarms more as necessary utilities such as water or electricity than regular household items.

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NEWS DISTRICT LINE

Too Darn Hot

Darrow Montgomery

In D.C.’s heat islands, temperatures can register 10 to 20 degrees hotter than in leafy neighborhoods. For those that live and work in those places, exposure to that heat can be uncomfortable and outright dangerous.

Columbia Heights Civic Plaza This story was produced by Hola Cultura’s Environmental Justice Storytelling Team as part of the Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning, which brings together young people between 16 and 25 and the organization’s professional staff to produce stories and special projects for Hola Cultura’s online magazine.

The team includes editorial fellow and lead writer Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe, editorial interns David H. Moreno, Alex Martin, and Marco Gutiérrez, social media intern Madison E. Goldberg, GIS intern Leul Bulcha, graphic design intern Isabella Padilla, web design interns Amanda Chirinos and David Lopez Mendez, GIS mapping mentor Byron Marroquin, and project director and series editor Christine MacDonald. Project advisors include the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, Dr. Isabella Alcañiz, associate professor of government and politics and director of the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Center at the University of Maryland, and Brenda Perez Amador, community activist and public servant.

This project was supported with funds from the Pulitzer Center, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and Spotlight DC. “It’s hot. It’s really hot out here,” says Chuck Jackson, a seller of hats who has hawked his wares on the streets of Washington since the early 2000s. Except for a brief hiatus this year after being diagnosed with diabetes, he’s made his living by supplying local shoppers with a wide and colorful selection of broad-brimmed picture hats, bucket hats, baseball caps, and visors.

Within a month of getting out of a nursing home, Jackson returned to street vending in June, just as D.C.’s usual sweaty, sweltering months were getting started. Temperatures crested 90 degrees in D.C. on six days in June and 18 days in July, according to AccuWeather. com. July 22 was one of those 90-plus degree days. Jackson was sitting in one of the hottest spots in all of D.C.—14th Street NW, across the street from the Columbia Heights Metro Station.

10 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Sitting on a collapsible chair in front of his improvised workspace, handcart tucked underneath and golf-size umbrella overhead, Jackson is inside one of Washington’s summertime “heat islands,” where high temperatures can soar as much as 10 or 20 degrees higher than in leafier parts of the District. Not only are tonier neighborhoods such as Barnaby Woods or Chevy Chase comparatively cool during the summer months, wealthier D.C. residents can leave town for the beach or the mountains this time of year. Jackson doesn’t have that option.

“I gotta survive,” he says. It’s my job. I’ve been doing this all my life.”

For Washington’s most vulnerable, the summer months aren’t just uncomfortable—they can be hard on their health and sometimes even fatal.

While people may think hurricanes or flooding would kill more people, extreme heat events are the biggest killer of any natural disaster, according to Dr. Laurence S. Kalkstein, an applied climatologist who studies the urban heat island effect in D.C. and other cities.

“We estimate that in the nation, in an average summer, 1,500 people die of the heat,” Kalkstein says.

With summertime temperatures rising and expected to soar as climate change takes hold, cities around the country, including D.C., are waking up to the need to protect residents, particularly the most vulnerable.

“We’re going to triple the number of extreme heat days by the end of the century, more or less,” says James Dunbar, a climate analyst with D.C.’s Department of Energy and the Environment.

This summer to date, Mayor Muriel Bowser has declared several multiday heat emergencies whenever forecasts surpass 95 degrees. Once the emergency is declared, the city’s heat emergency plan is activated and the D.C. Department of Human Services and the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency whir into action, putting neighborhood libraries and other community gathering spots into double-duty as cooling centers. These spaces are at the center of the city’s adaptive measures when it comes to extreme heat. D.C. and other cities are also exploring ways to reduce the number of annual heat emergencies that could mean the difference between life and death for people like Jackson, whose diabetes puts him at higher risk of heatstroke or other heat-related illness.

“Universally, heat is becoming a growing issue. That’s true internationally, nationally, but also at the local government level,” says Jennifer Li, a staff attorney and adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Harrison Institute for Public Law, who focuses on climate change adaptation from a community equity perspective. “We know that there is a strong correlation between historically redlined neighborhoods and heat.”

The Urban Heat Island Effect While heat is something that affects an entire city, not all of its residents experience it in the same way. As the sun beats down on Columbia Heights, Jackson and the other street vendors are particularly exposed. “[C]oming out here at 9 o’clock in the morning, I’m totally sweating pushing that cart, that’s how hot it is out,” says Jackson, who brings these wares on a handcart from his apartment on 16th Street NW. It’s a short walk, but even standing still on a summer day in D.C. can be oppressive.

For street vendors, as well as construction workers, landscapers, mail carriers, delivery drivers, child-care workers, day laborers, and

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NEWS DISTRICT LINE others who work outdoors, the summer months can be hazardous. Infants and toddlers are vulnerable to heat-related illnesses because of their inability to recognize symptoms. The elderly are at high risk in summertime heat. Excessive heat can also complicate pregnancies. For obese people, the heat retained in the body can also lead to rapid and dangerous overheating during the summer, while people with chronic medical conditions are also at heightened risk of illness or death.

The shopping plaza in Columbia Heights is dominated by large buildings and wide roads and sidewalks. The concrete and asphalt absorb heat, causing the surface and ambient temperatures to rise. It’s a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, which dates back to the 19th century. British amateur meteorologist Luke Howard put thermometers in downtown London and the surrounding countryside. As he observed the temperature throughout the year, he noticed that temperatures were higher in the urban area versus the rural area.

More than 200 years after Howard made those temperature readings, researchers are using satellite imagery, online mapping, and data analysis to revolutionize our understanding of the urban heat island effect, how heat islands emerge, and how to reduce the heat and its effect on the humans experiencing it.

In just the past few years, this new research has provided new insights into environmental justice, offering what Jeremy Hoffman calls “a socially useful data set to talk about inequity through the lens of a climate stressor.”

Heat island studies not only boldly expose how urban heat disproportionately hurts poor and vulnerable residents, they pinpoint the problem at a remarkably granular scale; point the way to solutions; and provide residents and activists with crucial information for fighting for more equitable public policy and opposing real estate developments that would contribute to the warming trends.

In 2016, Hoffman read a newspaper article about the work of Vivek Shandas, director of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab at Portland State University, while Hoffman was completing his Ph.D. at Oregon State University. That year Shandas had led a heat island campaign in Springfield and Eugene, Oregon, and the previous year he completed one in Portland.

Hoffman, today the David and Jane Cohn Scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, went on to study heat islands in Richmond in 2017. Shandas served as an adviser and his team created the study’s first maps. The project also led to story maps linking heat islands to housing discrimination there. He collaborated with the Richmond organization Groundwork RVA to come up with a climate resiliency plan.

The following year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funded a summer campaign in Baltimore and D.C. Civilian scientists set up temperature sensors on their cars and drove around both cities, recording temperatures one August day. Thanks to that data, Hoffman and Shandas were able to create maps indicating the warmest and coolest parts of both cities in the summertime.

These campaigns were not only revolutionary because of how the data was gathered, they also involved the residents of the same cities.

“This was the first kind of community science based approach,” Hoffman says. By involving the community, he believes that the residents affected by extreme heat can learn more about the weather events affecting their cities and help create solutions.

The data gathered during these two campaigns is publicly accessible and has informed heat island projects such as the Code Red series, the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism’s awardwinning project on heat and inequality in Baltimore, which inspired Hola Cultura’s heat island reporting this summer.

Using Hoffman’s 2018 heat islands data set, the Hola Cultura team created a map of D.C.’s heat islands, revealing where the District has its worst problems with urban heat.

Using ANC Single Member Districts as a means of zooming in more tightly on the District’s problem areas, the team found that sections of wards 1, 4 and 5 have the most heat islands. The single hottest district recorded was an afternoon reading in SMD 1A10 in Park View and Pleasant Plains, but when mapping the mean of the morning and afternoon readings, an even clearer picture emerges.

When taking the mean of the morning and afternoon temperatures those citizen mappers collected, the hottest SMD in the city is 5A08 in Ward 5 near the Fort Totten Metro station, followed by 4B06 in Ward 4’s Park Manor, and 1A11 in Ward 1, around the Columbia Heights Metro Station, across the street from where Jackson sells his hats. Of the top 20 heat island districts, 8 are in Ward 4, 7 are in Ward 5, and 5 more are in Ward 1. In fact, all of the top 32 hottest districts (out of 296) were located in wards 4, 5, and 1.

Temperature readings for wards 7 and 8 were among the cooler in the city, apparently thanks to the lusher tree cover and more single-family, stand-alone housing, but high temperatures alone do not determine a person’s “heat vulnerability.”

Less surprising than the relatively cool temperatures east of the river is that 12 of the top 20 coolest districts are in bucolic Ward 3 in Upper Northwest, though the afternoon temperature reading in SMD 3F05, along a commercial stretch of Connecticut Avenue NW near Politics & Prose bookstore, registered the fifth hottest afternoon reading, illustrating just how much heat islands are localized phenomena linked closely to the trees overhead and the heatabsorbing asphalt and concrete underfoot and emanating from the surrounding buildings.

Upper Northwest neighborhoods, by and large, continue to benefit today from development decisions that date back to their earliest days. For instance, when Chevy Chase D.C. was first developed on former farmland more than a century ago, it was envisioned, according to the Chevy Chase Historical Society, as a “modern planned community” … “ a new kind of neighborhood” that left behind the District’s overcrowded, chaotic streets, and the urban heat,

12 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

while taking advantage of a revolutionary technology of those times: the streetcar that carried the well-heeled to jobs in the city’s center.

In Upper Northwest neighborhoods, where the original developers are not only remembered for the “four squares,” Dutch colonials, and bungalows that largely still exists there today, planners also took great care in laying out the tree-dappled thoroughfares and picturesque green spaces, historic planning decisions that continue to help keep those neighborhoods cool a century later.

Advances in online mapping like the ones Hoffman and his colleagues have developed show with increasing clarity and granular detail how differently historically White neighborhoods were developed even as much as a century ago, and how those decisions keep those neighborhoods cool today, compared with neighborhoods of color in the very same cities, where heat islands are a legacy of racism and discriminatory housing policies.

Online mapping has made it possible to assess present conditions, plan for a better

future, and expose direct links between today’s urban heat and past decisions by public officials, private developers, bankers, and individual homeowners—even redlining.

Homeownership is inextricably connected to wealth and acquiring wealth through generations. A family that owns its home is more likely to have financial stability, send the kids to college, and climb socioeconomic ladders. But in the District and nationwide, people of color are less likely to own their own homes than White people. That trend has long historical roots and many chapters. One of the more infamous is “redlining,” a discriminatory housing policy established by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s and practiced by the Federal Housing Administration in such a manner that it limited access to homeownership and wealth creation among minorities and contributed to a range of social disparities. HOLC’s socalled “security maps” literally drew red lines through neighborhoods where residents of color lived, labeling them risky investments,

highways, railways, and industrial enterprises with a lot of heat-absorbing surfaces. Public housing projects, meanwhile, are seldom laid out like Upper Northwest’s “garden communities”; they are much more likely to have dense footprints made of a lot of heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt.

There is no existing redlining map for the District of Columbia. “It is not clear if HOLC chose not to survey Washington or if the survey results and maps simply were not preserved,” Amy Hillier, a planning scholar, wrote in a 2005 paper. However, the city’s long history of housing segregation has still been well documented. It runs the gamut from forced displacements to racially restrictive covenants, racist banking policies, and denied mortgage loans.

In neighborhoods that experienced “White flight” during the civil rights era and soon attracted new working- and middle-class African American families, these historically racist practices have had real and lasting effects. Take ANC 1A10 covering Pleasant Plains and Park View, which had the single hottest afternoon temperature reading in the District. Until the 1990s when Hispanic families began moving in, the neighborhood was almost exclusively home to Black residents, recalls Darren Jones, president of the Pleasant Plains Civic Association.

Jones grew up in Pleasant Plains and eventually purchased a home there in the early 1990s, but only with great determination. He describes mortgage companies at that time as predatory institutions that charged higher interest rates or refused loans to people of color and neighborhoods deemed risky.

“When I bought this place in ’93, it took six months to get a mortgage,” he says, despite being gainfully employed at the Library of Congress and teaching part time at the University of the District of Columbia. He had more than sufficient income to make the monthly payments, but still struggled to get a mortgage.

Today, people of color continue to suffer the legacies of segregationist practices. In what is considered “modern-day redlining,” African Americans and Latinx people are routinely denied mortgage loans “at rates far higher than their white counterparts,” according to an 2018 article in Reveal News. Though redlining practices have been outlawed for more than 50 years, “patterns of discrimination by banks and mortgage lenders that has kept people of color from building wealth” persist today.

Banks are lega lly obligated by t he Community Reinvestment Act to solicit clients from all communities, but critics say the Department of Justice has shown tepid interest in suing lenders for racial discrimination.

By the 2000s, many Black and Latinx Washingtonians were also facing displacement due to the rising cost of living, and higher property taxes driven by gentrification’s upward pressure on home values.

“The taxes have driven a few people out,” says Jones, whose own home now has an assessed value of $800,000.

To read more in the heat islands series, visit washingtoncitypaper.com/heatislands and holacultura.com.

© The Princess Bride Limited. All Rights Reserved.

which made it harder for aspiring homeowners to get mortgages and meant far less government and private investment. “[G]overnment regulations and recommendations at every level of government sought to keep Black and white residents separated, subsidizing construction, loans, and housing for white residents while preventing Black residents from building wealth through homeownership,” wrote the historical research firm Prologue DC, citing the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein, in a 2018 article published by the D.C. Policy Center.

Historians have documented redlining’s disturbing and continuing legacy in cities around the country, including D.C., where racial and social disparities in wealth, income, and homeownership are all too apparent, according to the D.C. Policy Center and other sources.

Redlining’s legacy has also, quite literally, been etched on District cityscapes.

The District’s long history of discriminatory public and private practices cemented patterns of segregation and underinvestment in neighborhoods of color, particularly Black communities. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually struck down racially restrictive covenants as unenforceable in 1948. The passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 went even further as a national repudiation of the country’s racist housing practices, but neighborhoods that are predominantly home to people of color continued to suffer from the consequences of longtime neglect and underinvestment.

“What we’re seeing now is the outcome of decades of housing discrimination,” says Li, the Georgetown attorney. Three groundbreaking scientific papers published in the past two years also reached that conclusion.

Hoffman and Shandas participated in a groundbreaking 2020 study, for instance, that drew a direct correlation between the locations where redlining occurred in 108 U.S. urban areas and the amount of green space in those cities today.

Another paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in January 2021 looked at 102 U.S. metropolitan areas to assess whether their “historical HOLC investment grade” correlates with the amount of green space in those places as of 2010. The authors concluded that “our findings align with those previous studies and suggest that the HOLC’s Security Maps affect current-day green space with decreased greenery in neighborhoods with worse HOLC grades.”

A third scientific paper published in NPJ Urban Sustainability concluded: “Our analysis of 37 metropolitan areas here shows that areas formerly graded D, which were mostly inhabited by racial and ethnic minorities, have on average ~23% tree canopy cover today. Areas formerly graded A, characterized by U.S.-born white populations living in newer housing stock, had nearly twice as much tree canopy (~43%). Results are consistent across small and large metropolitan regions.”

Researchers have noted that redlined communities are also more likely to have multilane

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NEWS DISTRICT LINE

Recorder’s Notebook

Darrow Montgomery

Social media spot news reporters deliver crime and collision news to readers faster than traditional media outlets. Whether their work is useful or harmful depends on who you ask.

Larry Calhoun

By Laura Hayes @LauraHayesDC In July 2020, two months after Larry Calhoun started tweeting about violent crime, a stray bullet hit him while he was driving in Prince George’s County. It shattered his elbow, ripping tendon from bone. But the man known on Twitter as DC REALTIME NEWS is an everything-happens-for-a-reason guy. “You can’t question God on why things happen,” he says of the incident. “The community looks at me differently because I’m not just a reporter reporting on people’s tragedies. No, I’ve been through it—the shooting, the ambulance ride, the recovery. I’m OK to report on this news, but I still have a heart.”

Calhoun hardly ever switches off his tablet, the chatter from radio scanners serving as a soundtrack. His fingers fly as he tweets about local shootings, stabbings, fires, major traffic collisions, and water rescues. “My feed is providing public safety awareness,” he says. “If a shooting is going on, you want to know because your kids could be outside playing. I’m gonna get it out within five minutes of it happening.”

He’s carved out a role in local media because when reporters have to cover “such a broad spectrum of things like politics and pandas,” he says, they can’t get to every homicide. “That’s why I started doing what I do. Everybody

send him $300 or more on normal days and up to $1,000 on the Fourth of July.

Local elected officials are taking notice.

“It’s a transparency tool,” says Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. She says she uses information from these accounts to track public safety patterns and direct resources. What she reads lets her know when to visit incident sites. “It’s allowed me to respond quickly to scenes of crimes and get information.

Sometimes when I get there, MPD is calling me saying, ‘We want to update you, there’s been a shooting.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah. I’m right here. I saw it on Killmoe or Alan Henney.”

As news outlets move away from police blotter reporting and reconsider how they cover crime, accounts such as DC REALTIME NEWS are filling the spot news void. The urge to know why sirens are wailing outside will always be there and social media makes information free to access and easy to share. The self-proclaimed “scanner boys” who operate these hyperactive accounts say they perform a public service in a region they all hail from.

Conversations with journalists and local professors reveal that widely broadcasting details of every homicide can be both helpful and harmful. Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at the Marshall Project, says while these feeds can pressure mayors to “prioritize solving and delivering accountability for violent crime especially in communities that have been underserved,” they can also create context vacuums that people with agendas, like politicians, can exploit.

The nature of spot news is that it’s so immediate that it can’t include information about motives or patterns or how suspects and victims are connected. Chammah and others also say the feeds

“The community looks at me differently because I’m not just a reporter reporting on people’s tragedies. No, I’ve been through it—the shooting, the ambulance ride, the recovery.”

—Larry Calhoun matters. That’s why my feed has grown so much. I’m consistent with getting every single major incident out.”

While some social media spot news reporters such as Alan Henney have been around for more than a decade, several new ones, including DC REALTIME NEWS, MoCo PG News, CordellTraffic, and Killmoenews, have risen to prominence in recent years. Together they have more than 47,000 followers on Twitter.

Some show their support with dollars—DC REALTIME NEWS and Killmoenews solicit Cash App contributions on their profiles.

Derrick, who asked to be identified by his first name for safety reasons, is behind Killmoenews and is Calhoun’s childhood friend. He says fans

14 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

can overemphasize crime and the perspective of police. In D.C., a city that’s grappling with police reform and 124 homicides so far this year, that can be especially concerning.

Calhoun was still recovering from his gunshot wound when he says a mass shooting on Dubois Place SE “put DC REALTIME NEWS on the map.” On Aug. 9, 2020, at least three shooters opened fire at a cookout, killing a 17-year-old and injuring 21 others. He’s convinced he broke the news when he started tweeting around 1 a.m., followed by 14 updates.

“That’s when I thought that I was passionate about what I started doing,” he says.

The 38-year-old who works in retail

management doesn’t have to rely on a radio to get information. Websites such as OpenMHz broadcast emergency dispatch stations and let listeners rewind the radio calls. Before he tweets, Calhoun typically waits for a battalion chief to arrive on the scene to confirm what he heard over the dispatch. He also listens for information to come across Fire and EMS channels. Neither he nor Henney nor Derrick wait for official press releases or statements from public information officers.

Calhoun won’t release names of victims until the police make them public. He also won’t share “lookouts,” descriptors of potential suspects, because he believes they’re not reliable.

He goes to scenes of major incidents about five times a month with a press pass he had made and business cards.

“The biggest scene I went to was a triple shooting in Southeast,” he says. “That was the most media I’ve seen. [NBC4 reporter] Shomari Stone was there. When I get there and I’m with the big media, that’s when I realized I’ve made it. And the ultimate compliment is when the police know who you are.”

Calhoun ran into Derrick of Killmoenews for the first time in decades at a crime scene.

“I watched him grow up,” Calhoun says. “Me and his sister were best friends. For us both to be doing what we’re doing, I’m proud of him.”

They repost each other’s content almost daily.

Derrick, 30, goes to more scenes because he also uses Instagram, which is more visually driven than Twitter. The former dump truck driver transitioned to running Killmoenews full time about a year ago. He considers himself a journalist and calls his new line of work “modern day news.”

“No one in the house is watching the news on TV unless they’re older—my great aunts and grandmas,” he says. “It’s a lot of teens that look up to the page. I’m making the news popular.”

FOX5 photojournalist Van Applegate runs into Derrick and Calhoun at scenes. “I not only think the local media respects what [Calhoun] is doing, anyone who says he hasn’t been on the radar of newsrooms is lying,” he says. Reporters check these accounts looking for stories, according to Applegate, and they often cite them in their coverage. “What they’re doing is relatively harmless and more so helpful to actual media establishments,” he says.

“I’ve often joked with those guys saying, ‘Call me when you’re ready for a full-time job.’ I’d put these guys on our assignment desk.”

Henney, 54, worked the assignment desk at WUSA9 from 2006 to 2009. Now he splits his time between Takoma Park and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. His career in spot news started in the 1980s, when he broadcast messages about emergencies using pagers for the Public Safety Network and Breaking News Network. Henney says reporters, lawyers, and public safety enthusiasts paid for the breaking news blurbs that were limited to about the same number of characters as a tweet.

People have been eavesdropping on scanner chatter for decades, but a policy shift in 2011 changed practices in D.C. MPD, then led by Cathy Lanier, encrypted most police

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radio traffic. In testimony defending the move, she argued that “new technology has allowed people—and especially criminals—to listen to police communications on a smartphone from anywhere.”

Lanier cited an example in her testimony where a 7th District sergeant suspected people were selling drugs out of a laundromat: “He tested this theory by going over the air to instruct units to meet him at the location, and then watched the subjects immediately clear the building.” In addition to “deterring crime,” Lanier said encryption protects officers, witnesses, and victims. News organizations weren’t pleased. “News media thought she was sticking it to them,” Henney says. “We’re all worried about the future. It’s a matter of control.”

Central to the debate is whether encryption gives police departments the opportunity to spin what happened. Henney points to the press release Minneapolis police distributed in May 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The headline of the release read: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”

It did not mention that former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

“If you read the press release that Minneapolis police put out and then you saw the video that the young people shot, there were two completely different narratives,” says Margot Susca, an associate professor of journalism at American University. “News organizations are reckoning with a huge issue of police power and police authority and how over the past few decades they’ve given control to that kind of police authority. … Reliance on official police sources has been a narrative that has marginalized people of color.”

She sees the popularity of accounts such as DC REALTIME NEWS and Killmoenews as tethered to America’s obsession with crime news and true crime stories. The same infatuation drives people to join neighborhood listservs and sign up for Citizen, a crime-tracking app. “People want to know what’s happening in their neighborhoods,” she says. “Is it news? No. Is it interesting? Yes.” That said, Susca does think social media spot news accounts compete with local TV news.

FOX5’s Applegate agrees. “Larry has gone out to the scene to see for himself,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s much different than what we would do. He gets eyes on it.”

Susca cautions Washingtonians against over relying on these accounts. “It fills a void and that’s great, but it shouldn’t be someone’s only source for news and information in the District,” she says. “What concerns me as a media scholar is an overreliance on police voices. If it’s people sitting in living rooms with scanners tweeting out whatever they hear, who gets the power in that narrative? It’s the police.”

Henney and Calhoun counter Susca’s statement and say what they’re doing takes skill and nuance. “A seasoned, competent public safety scanner listener is not the same as a forum on TikTok or Reddit that just decided one day to start monitoring police radio traffic,” Henney says, adding that the police dispatchers in D.C. work for the Office of Unified Communications

Darrow Montgomery

NEWS DISTRICT LINE

Larry Calhoun

“People want to know what’s happening in their neighborhoods,” Susca says. “Is it news? No. Is it interesting? Yes.” and act independently from MPD. “We do it responsibly and as factually as possible, being careful not to jeopardize a case or expose innocent people’s info.”

“My reports are the fastest and arguably the most accurate,” Calhoun adds. “And I’m doing all that without even a conversation with a [public information officer] or press release.

I have even had police tell me, ‘You have more information than we do.’ So how could I ever be a mouthpiece for anyone other than the community I love?”

That community stretches beyond D.C. proper to include Prince George’s, Montgomery, and Fairfax counties, where police dispatches aren’t encrypted. In D.C., they have to get scrappy and use unencrypted Fire and EMS channels. But if a shooting occurs and no one requires treatment, he might not hear about it.

He used to glean information about victims from the calls ambulances make en route to hospitals to tell staff what to expect. “We’ve got a 28-year-old male with a single gunshot wound to the arm and vitals are stable,” he says, mimicking a “consult call” he’d overhear before the city encrypted those in November 2020. “Now I

16 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

have to say, ‘Severity of injuries unknown.’ I’m going to have a talk with the fire chief to see why that changed.”

FEMS Public Information Officer Vito Maggiolo says encrypting these channels allows the department to protect private health and medical information. The information on radio calls, he argues, is specific enough that patients could easily be identified later. He also says encrypting “helps prevent those who commit acts of violence from learning which hospitals their victims are being transported to.”

Calhoun says he doesn’t name hospitals.

The social media spot news crew fights to get details fast because the immediacy of information draws people in. If they tweet erroneous or incorrect information, they usually send corrections and updates. “You have to understand that anyone who is providing breaking news like we do, you cannot expect it to be as refined,” Henney says. “That’s not our mission. If it was, they wouldn’t follow us.”

Gabriel Contreras, a Ward 8 resident, is an avid follower. “East of the river has a good amount of crime,” he says. “If I see a bunch of repeated events, I’m going to avoid the area

if I’m driving or walking through there.” He describes social media spot news as “a new breed of journalism” that complements what he reads elsewhere. “I don’t know if you need to write a Peter Hermann story to be a journalist. They’re reporting on incidents that are happening in real time.” Hermann, a Washington Post reporter, may take longer to publish, but Contreras says he appreciates how he “contextualizes it and brings in the human element.”

“If you’re trying to get information about what’s happening at the corner of Good Hope and Martin Luther King and the Post isn’t covering that neighborhood or they’re covering it behind a paywall, DC REALTIME NEWS will tell you what’s happening there,” Susca says.

Her concern, she says, is whether the feeds distort perceptions. “If this is a site you turn to, it will overemphasize how much crime you believe exists in the community,” she says.

Chammah from the Marshall Project agrees.

“Scholars found that there are points in time when the public’s perception of crime is way out of sync with how much crime is happening,” he says, citing Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns as an example.

“Because people tend to reason from examples, the more examples they’re hit with—whether it’s tweets from the scanner or watching the 10 p.m. local news—it appears that crime is out of control,” Chammah says. “I’m not saying the reporting is inaccurate, but it’s so laser focused about what just happened that it doesn’t cover broader trends and contextual factors that cause these crimes.”

Consuming a steady stream of violent crime

NEWS DISTRICT LINE content without context, such as whether victims are random or targeted, can be problematic, according to Dr. Abigail Marsh, a professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Psychology. She studies emotional processes like empathy and how they relate to altruism, aggression, and psychopathy.

“It’s not bad to learn about crimes in general except that we’re not getting denominators—all the positive interactions that are going on in a city of 600,000 people every day,” Marsh says.

“Those 600,000 people are helpful and trustworthy, but you’re not getting that denominator in the news. This is when people start developing the perception that the world is a much more dangerous, risky place than it is.”

As a result, Marsh says, people can become more anxious and lose trust in the people around them. She likens reading crime coverage without context to googling symptoms on sites like WebMD. You might put in that you have a headache and a fever and come away thinking you have cancer because you don’t have the complete picture a physician can provide. “You need a much more complete set of information to make good judgment,” Marsh says.

That said, she sees potential value in social media spot news because it creates a record of every incident. “I, like everybody else, care about my own safety and the safety of my family and friends and even people I don’t know,” she says. “It’s a terrible tragedy anytime anybody is killed. I’m a scientist and I believe in the value of knowledge. If we don’t understand the world accurately as it really is, we can’t fix it.”

Henney, who is White, believes exposure is critical, especially because he thinks crimes impacting White or affluent residents attract more coverage. “We have a largely liberal press and yet they don’t cover the murders of Black men in Black neighborhoods,” he alleges.

“Addressing the root of violence starts with acknowledging there is a problem. That starts by us, and others, documenting it.”

Take the July 17 shooting outside Nationals Park as an example. Derrick, who is Black, was incensed by how much coverage it received, with both CNN and the New York Times weighing in. Six-year-old Nyiah Courtney was killed in a shooting in Congress Heights the night before.

On Aug. 8 Killmoenews tweeted: “IT WAS A MASS SHOOTING LAST NIGHT ON NEW YORK AVE AND THE NIGHT BEFORE ON 53RD STREET BUT A SHOOTING OUTSIDE OF NATS STA DI U M WA S COV ER ED LIKE IR AN BOMBED THE BALLPAR K SAD!!!!!!!!!!!”

Print and broadcast reporters cover events and crimes in all quadrants of the District, but resources—time, energy, and staff—are limited.

“We’re not going to report on every shooting that comes down the scanner feed,” Applegate says. “[Social media spot news is] putting it out there for people to see. But I would take it with a grain of salt and caution people to understand how dispatch works.”

It’s not uncommon for Calhoun, Derrick, and others to tweet emotional appeals calling for better, more even crime coverage from

mainstream media or they make stop-the-violence pleas.

On Aug. 12, DC REALTIME NEWS tweeted: “There is some senseless ass killing going on, these are not people who are in the streets gangbanging, we talking about hardworking taking care of their family folks. PROTECT YOURSELF and your love ones by anymeans necessary. I said, what I said. Damn Shame.”

Lewis George observes how their points of view come through in their tweets. “One of the things they do sometimes is they add an emotional aspect,” she says. “I’ve seen them memorialize individuals who have passed away. I’ve seen them take the opportunity to talk about us needing to do something. They also add an advocacy piece there. They can do some of those things that news stations aren’t able to do.”

She considers the accounts as part of “the natural evolution of journalism and social media” that grants more people, especially those who have been historically marginalized, entry into a competitive and shrinking field.

“You have your major news outlets and newspapers, but this is an opportunity for a generation to shape their own stories and not let major news stations shape stories for them,” she says.

The 17-year-old behind MoCoPG News and the 21-year-old running CordellTraffic are both White, but they’re a part of the next generation. Cordell Pugh, an undergraduate student studying global health who writes for the MoCo Show, has been tweeting about Montgomery and Fairfax counties for a couple of years. He considers himself to be his biggest competition because school and friends also demand his attention.

“I originally started it as a traffic account when I thought there were many traffic instances going unreported and I moved into public safety when I noticed the same thing,” he says. “What I try to do is answer the simple ‘what?’ What are those 47 emergency vehicles doing on my street? I try not to get into motives or nuance, both of which can quickly be a slippery slope of getting one detail wrong or misconstrued.”

The founder of MoCoPG News is in high school and asked to remain anonymous. He picked up scanning during the pandemic.

He mainly covers Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, but will help out in D.C. if it gets busy and his colleagues need assistance. “I never wanted to do news,” he says. “That seems like a very hard job. You have to be all professional.” Henney reached out in January and encouraged him to start his own account.

He’s young enough that he’s still learning how to drive but old enough to consider his mental health. “It got to me over the summer,” he says. He was taking a month off when Cordell messaged him about a crash. He pulled up OpenMHz. “A guy was decapitated. It was very brutal just hearing it. It made my stomach hurt. I never realized how brutal things are sometimes.” He takes breaks. “During the day I try to stay away from it because I’m young. I want to enjoy my last year of high school, but I’m willing to work at night sometimes because I enjoy doing it.” washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 17

Play Dough Local college athletes navigate the new, exciting, but confusing world where they can profit off their name, image, and likeness.

By Kelyn Soong Photographs by Darrow Montgomery Angel Reese

On the left side of Angel Reese’s neck, behind her ear, is a tattoo of the letter A and the number 10, in red cursive writing. The tattoo, which she got in June, represents her name and her longtime jersey number, which she currently wears on the University of Maryland women’s basketball team. Reese hopes that A10 branding and a logo she helped design will soon be on T-shirts, sweaters, and other merchandise that people can buy.

“I was always ‘A10’ in high school, and I was like, maybe this could be my brand,” she says.

“I’m going to get it trademarked and everything so that nobody else can take it.”

Before July 1, the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibited athletes such as Reese from profiting off their personal brand, regardless of what sport or in what division they

played. But since the governing body adopted an interim policy across its three divisions allowing all incoming and current NCAA college athletes to benefit from the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL), athletes that once had to navigate the complex web of compliance rules that often prevented them from making money are pouncing on opportunities to profit off themselves and their associated brands. The interim policy—enacted after the Supreme Court decided on June 21, in a unanimous 9-0 decision, to uphold a lower court’s ruling that NCAA rules restricting “educationrelated benefits” violated antitrust laws—will remain in place until federal legislation or new NCAA rules are adopted. Meanwhile, colleges can adopt their own policies with additional restrictions, as long as they are consistent with

18 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

the laws of the state where the school is located.

The portion of the Maryland legislature’s bill that relates to NIL stipulates that the state’s public colleges cannot prevent student athletes from earning compensation from the use of their own name, image, or likeness. The NIL policies in that bill do not go into effect until 2023. In Virginia, NIL language was recently stricken from a spending bill, while D.C. has not introduced an NIL bill.

“With the variety of state laws adopted across the country, we will continue to work with Congress to develop a solution that will provide clarity on a national level,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said in a statement released with the interim policy announcement. “The current environment—both legal and legislative—prevents us from providing a

more permanent solution and the level of detail student-athletes deserve.”

For many college athletes, including those who play in or hail from the D.C. area, the rule change was long overdue. Reese, ranked the No. 2 women’s basketball player in the class of 2020 by ESPN, says brands have been reaching out to her since high school. She would usually receive the promotional requests via direct message on her social media accounts, but because she feared breaking any compliance rules and losing her college eligibility, she ignored them.

Now, the 19-year-old from Randallstown, Maryland, has signed multiple deals that have paid her thousands of dollars cumulatively. The Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation approved her LLC, she finalized her A10 logo with the intention of trademarking

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it, and she hired a sports marketing agency to help her partner with even more companies.

Reese is also one of several NCAA athletes who has inked a deal with the skincare brand Starface.

But with the NCAA leaving the formal policies up to individual schools and states, many athletes have found the process overwhelming, stressful, or confusing. With the new NIL rules, the spotlight shines even brighter on athletes already balancing academics, sports, and everything else that comes with being a college student. Those in demand are taking full advantage of the rule change and figuring out the process as they go, often on their own.

“I mean, I was really happy, honestly, because so many people have DMed me before like, ‘Hey, could you rep my brand? Could you do this and that?’ I’m like, I don’t want to do anything illegally, and everybody was just offering me money,” Reese says. “And then it’s like, I was overwhelmed on July 1. I had no clue about anything.”

Tai Bibbs

Losing the opportunity to play his senior year because the Ivy League canceled the 2020-2021 winter season due to the pandemic did not help raise Bibbs’ profile.

20 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Howard University men’s basketball player Tai Bibbs didn’t know what to expect on July 1, the first day the NCAA’s new rules went into place. He wondered if he, a fifth-year transfer from Columbia University, would receive a bunch of calls, and if the experience would be similar to his initial college recruiting process, when he spoke to multiple people at a time.

When the day arrived, Bibbs, 22, hoped to receive some calls, but the demand for his image wasn’t instantaneous.

“It’s uncharted territory, for real,” Bibbs says.

“I think everyone’s kind of still learning as we go.”

While playing as a 6-foot-3 guard at Columbia, Bibbs averaged 6.5 points in three seasons with the Lions. Losing the opportunity to play his senior year because the Ivy League canceled the 2020-2021 winter season due to the pandemic did not help raise his profile. Bibbs doesn’t have the same social media reach of Reese or other high-ranked recruits or athletes that have amassed large followings on Instagram or TikTok. But he still intends to carve out a place for himself in this new landscape of college athlete endorsements.

With the help of his former Columbia basketball teammate, Jake Klores, Bibbs was able to secure a deal with GCDC, a bar and restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, on July 1. Klores is currently working on an app called Workhorse, which aims to connect college athletes with local businesses for marketing opportunities, and is connected to GCDC through his uncle, who started the restaurant. In a tweet posted on July 1, Bibbs wrote that any Howard University student who presented their student ID would get 10 percent off their meal for the month of July.

For the promotion, Bibbs says he received $200 in gift cards to the restaurant and a onetime payment of $50. Randall Brumant, another graduate student transfer from

Columbia University, also signed the deal. Both Bibbs and Brumant played for Howard men’s basketball head coach, Kenneth Blakeney, a former assistant coach at Columbia.

“I’m not sure if more things will come during the season or how that will even look,” Bibbs says. “But I’m still hoping to do as many deals as possible. It’s a really, really cool thing that we are able to kind of profit off this sort of thing.”

Even if Bibbs isn’t getting paid thousands of dollars in endorsement money, the extra money goes a long way. The Ivy League does not give out athletic scholarships, and while Bibbs did receive a sizable financial aid package that he says “a lot of” athletes receive, he believes an extra couple hundred dollars would have made living in New York City as a Division I collegiate athlete more comfortable and perhaps even helped him perform better on the court.

He took out student loans last year to share an apartment in the city with teammates.

Thinking back on his time at Columbia, Bibbs recalls times when he would be hungry after practice and the closest open options near campus would be fast food restaurants. He dealt with injuries throughout his freshman and sophomore years and now believes it could have been attributed to his diet.

“There’s definitely times where you’re hungry, and you’re eating like peanut butter jelly, or, like, mac and cheese all the time,” Bibbs says. “As collegiate athletes, I think we definitely grind and we put a lot of wear and tear on our bodies, and, I mean, the dining halls aren’t great. One, like the food doesn’t always taste that good and two, it’s not really like great food that you’re putting in your body. And the unfortunate thing about it ... is the fact that oftentimes healthy food is way more expensive than food that’s not so good for you.”

Bibbs also believes that the new rules will allow him access to different opportunities, such as modeling, that he may not have had previously. Such opportunities come at a time when attention paid to college athletes is increasing due to their social media reach and their comfort in expressing themselves on those platforms.

“It’s like the biggest platform many of us will have for the rest of our lives so I’m just trying to maximize this opportunity,” he says.

Rohann Asfaw, a cross-country and track runner for the University of Virginia, started his TikTok account in the fall of 2018.

Within four months, he had amassed more than 100,000 followers. Asfaw, who turned 22 earlier this month and is studying to get a master’s in educational psychology, used the app to post videos of himself dancing and participating in other viral trends and memes. He now has 1.3 million followers on the platform after uploading several posts a week. But because of NCAA rules, Asfaw could not profit from any of the popularity he gained from the app.

He feels relieved that the rules have changed

washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 21

but also frustrated that it took so long.

“I definitely missed out on a lot with the rule being what it was in the past,” Asfaw says. “It sucks to think about it, it really does. I know I missed out on a lot of money. I know not too many athletes can say the same, but I try not to think about it too much, just ’cause it’s sometimes unfortunate. I mean, I can’t really go back.

I wish they had made the decision earlier ’cause I know it was in the works for a while.”

Asked to give an estimate of how much potential money he could have earned had the rule change been in place earlier, Asfaw says it’s “way too much to even calculate.” In 2019, when his account was most popular and he posted every other day, Asfaw says he would have looked into hiring an agent and sold merchandise or T-shirts with his face on it. As with Reese, he was approached via social media by brands asking him to promote their products long before July 1, 2021. One person, he says, offered him $100 to dance to an original song the artist recorded.

“People would all the time ask me to dance to their songs, to kind of promote their songs,” Asfaw says. “I was a little iffy about doing that because I was like, ‘Am I going to lose my eligibility?’ So that would have been a big thing.”

Asfaw, who grew up in Rockville and won multiple Maryland 4A state titles as a crosscountry and track-and-field runner for Richard Montgomery High School, has yet to sign any endorsement deals. Instead, he has been focusing on an online teaching job for the Fairfax Collegiate Summer Program, school work, and running, and wants to take his time before diving into any endorsements.

“The last thing I want this to do is stress me out,” Asfaw says.

Asfaw used to spend hours a week on his TikTok videos, before cutting back on posting this past year. Sometimes he would show up to races sore from practicing dances. “I don’t want to do that again,” he says. “At the end of the day, I really just want to be really fast at running.” But he adds that he would have felt “more pressure to upload” content if he had been hired by a company that was paying him. Many of the deals that NCAA athletes sign require them to post about the product on their social media accounts.

While this allows athletes to use their platform to expand their reach, studies have shown that social media use can have detrimental effects on a user’s psychological health.

“It’s just another added layer of something to think about to put on their plate and to manage,” says Hillary Cauthen, a clinical sports psychologist based in Austin, Texas. “And that takes a lot of mental energy. It takes emotional energy. And so there is a bit of a concern there of like, how are we going to best educate our student athletes so they are prioritizing themselves and things that matter for them?”

Reese, who has more than 52,000 followers on Instagram and around 38,000 followers on TikTok, embraces social media.

She doesn’t consider posting product endorsement content pressure because she is constantly posting to those accounts anyway. Plus, Reese

Tai Bibbs

Opportunities come at a time when attention paid to college athletes is increasing due to their social media reach and their comfort in expressing themselves on those platforms. wants to use her platform and brand to grow women’s basketball.

“Being able to be in the spotlight and getting the same attention as the men are is really important to me,” she says.

But Reese is also cognizant of her time and her own limitations in finding deals and sifting through offers, so she hired a marketing consultant from GSE Worldwide, a talent representation and sports marketing agency that represents professional athletes in a variety of sports, including football, tennis, golf, and since July 1, college athletics. Reese is the agency’s first basketball player and women’s college athlete, according to Jeanine Juliano, the director of talent marketing for GSE Worldwide.

“I think what really differentiates her, aside

22 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Angel Reese

from her being so great at what she does on the court, is that she’s wonderful at social media,” Juliano says. “So it really makes it quite easy. It’s almost more like an influencer.”

GSE typically charges a standard of 20 percent commission on their clients’ deals.

Reese’s mother, also named Angel, helps her vet businesses and endorsements. Sometimes the companies ask for Reese and her brother Julian, a freshman on the Maryland men’s basketball team. Reese says that one of the challenges is making sure she is involved with the right companies. She says she’s declined many deals. “I don’t want to get into something that I’m not interested in, just doing it for the money,” Reese says.

Her mother is concerned that deals could

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POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF CABENUVA CABENUVA may cause serious side effects, including: • Allergic reactions. Call your healthcare provider right away if you develop a rash with CABENUVA. Stop receiving CABENUVA and get medical help right away if you develop a rash with any of the following signs or symptoms: ° fever ° blisters or sores in mouth ° generally ill feeling ° blisters ° redness or swelling of the eyes ° tiredness ° muscle or joint aches ° swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue ° trouble breathing • Post-injection reactions have happened within minutes in some people after receiving their rilpivirine injection. Most symptoms resolved within a few minutes after the injection. Symptoms may include: ° trouble breathing ° feeling warm ° stomach cramps ° feeling light-headed or feeling like you are going to pass ° sweating out (faint) ° numbness of your mouth ° blood pressure changes ° feeling anxious

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF CABENUVA (cont’d) CABENUVA may cause serious side effects, including: (cont’d) • Liver problems. People with a history of hepatitis B or C virus or people who have certain liver function test changes may have an increased risk of developing new or worsening changes in certain liver tests during CABENUVA treatment. Liver problems have also happened in people without history of liver problems or other risk factors. Your healthcare provider may do blood tests to check your liver function. Call your healthcare provider right away if you develop any of the following signs or symptoms of liver problems: ° your skin or the white part ° nausea or vomiting of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice) ° loss of appetite dark or “tea-colored” urine ° pain or tenderness on the right side of ° your stomach area light-colored stools (bowel ° movements) ° itching Depression or mood changes.

Call your healthcare provider or get • emergency medical help right away if you have any of the following symptoms: ° feeling sad or hopeless ° have thoughts of hurting yourself feeling anxious or restless (suicide) or have tried to hurt yourself ° The most common side effects of CABENUVA include: • pain, tenderness, hardened mass or • headache lump, swelling, redness, itching, • muscle or bone pain bruising, and warmth at the • nausea injection site • sleep problems • dizziness • fever • rash • tiredness These are not all the possible side effects of CABENUVA. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

GET MORE INFORMATION • Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist.

• Go to CABENUVA.com or call 1-877-844-8872, where you can also get FDA-approved labeling.

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24 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Courtesy Torri Huske

Torri Huske

“The luck of draw that these rules came into effect right when I’m about to go into my freshman year of college is like very lucky,” Huske says.

impact team dynamics, not just on the Maryland women’s basketball team but at other schools, with players potentially getting jealous of teammates due to the attention from NIL deals. But Reese says she hasn’t encountered that. Her Maryland teammates are all supportive, she says, and Reese encourages the less social media savvy to post more often.

And while the University of Maryland launched a student athlete development program called MOMENTUM and partnered with Opendorse, a sports technology company specializing in athlete endorsements, to provide personal brand development resources, it is up to the athletes to seek out deals.

“They have to work at this,” says Jason Yellin, the strategic communications officer and an associate athletics director at Maryland. “A lot of people think that this is going to be—not that it’s not going to be easy, but you have to work at it just like anything else. I mean, there’s a lot of different components to it.”

The Maryland athletics department has sent out its own interim NIL policy to its more than 550 college athletes. Among the rules are that compensation earned is not provided in exchange for athletics performance or achievement, NIL compensation opportunities are not performed when the athlete is engaged in official team activities, and that athletes cannot use university or athletic department registered trademarks.

“This is not a pay for play situation,” Yellin says. “Compensation is earned and is not provided in exchange for athletic performance.

You can’t pay somebody for being like All-Big Ten or All-American ... They have to do something, quid pro quo, they have to earn that. They have to actually do something, they have to go and make an appearance, sign autographs, do a Cameo, do a lesson or run a clinic, any of those things, merchandise, promoting something on social media.”

When Route One Athletics, which describes itself as “an e-commerce platform that specializes in making trendy, affordable state pride apparel and accessories,” announced its partnership with Reese on Instagram last month, no Maryland athletics or school logos were visible in the photo. The same goes for the recent photo shoot Reese did for the Imperfect Brand, a clothing company based in Annandale.

Reese says she is also talking with Jimmy’s Famous Seafood and hopes to start a clothing line for tall women.

The NIL rule change has allowed Reese to explore her passions outside of basketball, and while her ultimate goal is to play basketball professionally at the highest level, these opportunities give her a taste of her potential future.

“Once I’m done with basketball, I want to be a model,” she says.

On June 14, 18-year-old Torri Huske of Arlington set the American record in the women’s 100-meter butterfly at the U.S. Olympic

Trials and qualified for the Tokyo Olympics.

A few weeks later, a day after the NCAA’s interim NIL rule went into effect, Huske’s family received a call from a well-known competitive swimwear apparel company. Speedo, TYR, and Arena would all eventually contact them.

“We had always thought that depending on what she did in the Olympics, then that would be the situation that would be the trigger, if she did well,” says Huske’s father, Jim. “And instead, basically setting the American record in trials really made people a little anxious [to sign her]. Because it was so close to the world record.”

On Aug. 13, Huske announced that she had signed a deal with TYR in an Instagram post.

Both she and her father declined to share the monetary figure of the deal, but Jim says it is a “multiyear deal” that is “very fair market.”

TYR also sponsors Olympic gold medalists and professional swimmers Katie Ledecky, Simone Manuel, and Lilly King. At the Tokyo Olympics, Huske finished fourth in the 100-meter butterfly, just one one-hundreth of a second behind the bronze medalist, and won a silver medal as part of the 4x100-meter medley relay. She will head to California later this year to swim for the Stanford University Cardinals and would not have been able to sign a deal like this before the rule change.

“I think it was really overwhelming, just because it was happening so fast,” Huske says about signing the TYR deal while training and competing in the Olympics. “I was thinking about it before a little bit, but it was never something that was really on my mind.”

Jim estimates that he had about 20 to 30 calls with people at Stanford, 50 to 70 calls with TYR representatives, and another 15 to 20 calls with a lawyer that helped them through the process.

Because Stanford swimming has an agreement with Arena, Jim says the 20-page contract has a lot of “flexibilities listed in it.” He believes that while Huske competes for Stanford, she will wear Arena and wear TYR in nonschool competitions.

“Torri doesn’t want to stick out,” Jim explains. “She wants to be a full-fledged team member. So while she’s swimming for Stanford in Stanford, she will be wearing their suit and their equipment and that sort of thing ... But when she swims like at Worlds next year, or some of the other big meets ... she’s going to be swimming in TYR.” While the contract will help financially, Jim says that Huske won’t be living off it. Stanford offered her an athletic scholarship, and the TYR deal will further help set her up for life after college. Still, Huske says that some of her older peers have marveled at how everything seems to be falling into place for the young Olympian and first-year college student.

“The luck of draw that these rules came into effect right when I’m about to go into my freshman year of college is like very lucky,” she says.

washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 25

ARTS

Whose Stories Get Told Darrow Montgomery

The documentary Fierceness Served! The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse shines light on an iconic but often overlooked venue for D.C.’s Black LGBTQ community.

Wayson Jones and Michelle Parkerson in front of the now-shuttered ENIKAlley Coffeehouse.

By Sarah Marloff @SarahMarloff It ’s t h e i n t i m ac y of E N I K A l le y Coffeehouse that Wayson Jones remembers most. The small carriage house-turned-performance space located just off H Street NE was a thriving hub for D.C.’s Black LGBTQ community in the 1980s. “I remember the intimacy.

I remember the feeling of community,” Jones tells City Paper. “That was palpable—it seemed that everyone knew one another.”

Jones, who describes himself as gregarious, admits he still felt a “little socially awkward”

during his first few visits to ENIKAlley, a performance venue, rehearsal space, and gathering spot for artists and political organizations that opened in 1982. A musician, performer, and visual artist, Jones didn’t begin to feel truly at home in the coffeehouse community until he began performing on its stage, often with his longtime friend and frequent collaborator Essex Hemphill, the renowned poet, activist, and editor of Brother to Brother.

Jones—along with acclaimed local artist and activist Christopher Prince, award-winning filmmaker Michelle Parkerson, writer and founding member of performance poets and

26 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

writers’ collective Station-to-Station Gregory Adams, and playwright Pamela A. Jafari— has spent the past two years working to tell the long lost story of ENIKAlley. On Aug. 21, their new documentary, Fierceness Served! The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse, premieres virtually.

Directed by Parkerson, the 34-minute film combines history, interviews, archival photos, music, and spoken word to tell the story of the influential but oft-forgotten space, which shuttered in 1989.

Though its brick facade was unassuming, ENIKAlley was a game-changing space for Black queer people to gather freely and

unapologetically. And it was a place for Black LGBTQ performers to work together and perfect their art. “Collaboration was an important part of the Coffeehouse experience,” says Prince, who frequently performed with Jones, Hemphill, Parkerson, and others, via email. “I remember the long afternoons or evenings of rehearsals, repeating lines and poetry over and over again. This was the work that built art and family.”

In the early ’80s, Ray Melrose and his partner, Gary, decided to convert the carriage house facing the alley behind their home at 816 I St. NE to accommodate the many people

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washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 27

ARTS already attending their potlucks and gatherings. “It’s literally the found space in an alley for majority Black, but just also in general queer artists to find themselves,” says Delan Ellington, a graduate student in public history at Howard University and Rainbow History Project board member who is also featured in the film. It’s “indicative of how Black queer people have to make their own queer spaces to do what they need to do, what they want to do,” Ellington says.

Prince describes the space as basic: hot during summer months and cold in winter when the brick fireplace was ablaze. But despite its modest appearance, the venue was a space for artists such as Hemphill, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith, who came from near and far to perform within those walls. When the space was full, attendees would often watch performances through a large square cutout in the second floor loft, which Prince suspects was originally created to feed horses once housed below. Sometimes, people’s legs would dangle through the opening, says Prince.

But the coffeehouse was also a place for political and social groups to meet and organize. According to Prince, the D.C.-Baltimore Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, which later became the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, frequently gathered at the coffeehouse during the ’80s. A year after opening, the space also became homebase for D.C.’s Sapphire Sapphos, the city’s first ongoing political, social, and cultural group for Black lesbians.

Scholars have referred to the 1980s as the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance. Some say it was in keeping with the changing culture, others say it was a response to AIDS. As Darius Bost, Ph.D., author of Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (who is interviewed in the film), explains in an 2019 essay for Oxford African American Studies Center, other factors leading to the renaissance were the “the rise of the Christian right, and the backlash against civil rights gains made in the 1960s and 1970s,” as well as cultural and political movements within Black America. Jones says it was happening in various cities, but D.C.’s contribution to the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance stood out.

“There was really nothing like the coffeehouse that was an actual, physical space,” says Jones.

“A venue that was all ours.”

Jones is not the only one to make such claims about D.C.’s contribution to Black queer culture. In the film, Earl Fowlkes, president and CEO of the Center for Black Equity, recounts his first time patronizing the coffeehouse while visiting from New York. The space was filled with “people who looked like me and I was stunned because I never did anything cultural with people of color in the LGBT community in New York. I went to Broadway plays, Lincoln Center, I went to Carnegie Hall,” says Fowlkes, adding: “Very few people were doing cultural work.”

Today, Fowlkes calls D.C. home. Parkerson agrees: “It was, in fact, as many people say in the film, the hub of the Black Gay Renaissance of the 1980s.”

The pandemic impacted the documentary’s

funding and, ultimately, its length. Though the steering committee (Jones, Prince, Parkerson, Jafari, and Adams) had hoped to make the documentary 60 to 90 minutes, they received a Humanities DC grant to make a film under 40 minutes and that’s what they fulfilled with Fierceness Served! It manages to pack a lot of history into its humble half hour, leaving viewers hungry for more. “Coming up with an idea that would at least inspire people to go deeper in a half-hour format was what I was challenged with,” says Parkerson, who has also directed the documentaries A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, Storme: Lady of the

died of AIDS. But the spark that started this journey was lit in 2019, when a two-part panel on the history of d.c. space failed to mention the coffeehouse or any of the performers who perfected their craft on its stage. Jones, who performed regularly at d.c. space, along with Hemphill, Prince, and other burgeoning coffeehouse artists, calls the venue, which sat at 7th and E streets NW from 1977 to 1991, the most progressive in the city. It featured everything from punk to poetry, avant-garde jazz to dinner theater, but despite its diverse lineups, Jones says only the punk scene was addressed at the panel.

The coffeehouse was also a place for political and social groups to meet and organize. According to Prince, the D.C.-Baltimore Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, which later became the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, frequently gathered at the coffeehouse during the ’80s.

Jewel Box, and several other films about iconic Black lesbian artists. She also credits the coffeehouse for helping fan the flames of her career.

“It at least needed to be a ninety-minute film,” says Parkerson, noting that each person named in the documentary deserves their own feature. “But I’m happy we got it done. And it’s a half hour and it’s a beginning,” she says.

Defined by the pandemic, it’s clear Fierceness Served! was made during COVID-19—some of the people interviewed are masked, and others share memories via Zoom, including many West Coast artists such as Jewelle Gomez.

The effect is a feeling of urgency—the creators’ and participants’ determination to tell the story of the coffeehouse and its artists is palpable. But that urgency runs beyond needing to tell the tale. As Parkerson explains, the steering committee couldn’t have predicted the pandemic, but it wasn’t going to stop them from making the film, stating: Perhaps there’s never an “optimal time” to tell one’s story.

“There’s a reason why it happened during a pandemic,” says Parkerson. “It was also quite a parallel with what the coffeehouse was about at the time with the AIDS epidemic at its development. Why do this now? Why do that then?”

The similarities of the two pandemics hover in the film, especially because many of the coffeehouse crew, including Melrose and Hemphill,

28 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

“It basically covered all the White stuff,” Jones explains. “I leave the second time and I’m like, why should I expect anybody—and specifically this White guy who wasn’t around […]— why should I expect him to tell our story? It was really this feeling of: Don’t wait for somebody else, tell your own story.”

So Jones called Prince, and before long the steering committee of the five “participating witnesses”—as Parkerson refers to the team— was plotting how to ensure this crucial part of D.C.’s history became known. “That anger was kind of a catalyst,” says Jones. “I didn’t specifically have a film in mind. I just had the idea to tell the story and in a way that would be archival.”

The question of whose stories get told drives the documentary. In it, Ellington asks: “If we don’t collect and preserve our own history, who is going to collect and preserve it?”

Expanding on this thought, which they credit to the Combahee River Collective, Ellington explains: “The cliché is ‘history is written by the victors’”—typically White, straight, cisgender men and, to a lesser degree, women. Those are the stories that get told and the places that get memorialized. According to Ellington, the National Registry of Historic Places has fewerthan 20 LGBTQ sites, and only three have to do with Black queer people.

Even White queer historians with the best of intentions might not uncover a full account of Black LGBTQ history, explains Ellington. They believe the path toward better uncovering Black queer history starts with Black queer historians being handed the torch.

It also has to do with who is recording the history and whose stories are being collected.

Ellington calls it the “snowball effect”: when a historian interviews one person who then connects them to other sources within their community. The resulting network has to do with who the historian starts with and who they have access to. “It has always been pick and choose, and scarcely, as to what Black history is carried on, what Black queer history is even talked about,” says Ellington.

Parkerson echoes Ellington and Jones about the need to tell your own story. It’s why she came on board after hearing Jones’ experience with the 2019 panel. A “corrective” was needed, she says. “You can’t count on people, and queer historians out there, to suddenly discover it and say, ‘Hey, this might make [an] interesting idea.’”

Much like the coffeehouse, which is remembered for its collaborative, family-like energy, Parkerson says making the film was a collaborative effort, with the ultimate goal of doing right by the space’s history. It’s why the film doesn’t feel like a typical documentary. Parkerson says: “It needed to be an artistic piece. It’s not journalism in that sense.”

While the story of ENIKAlley has flown under the radar for the past several decades, its legacy has not. “The coffeehouse mattered because it was a space for all these artists and creators to come together and be in a place of collaboration, a place of support and affirmation,” says Ellington. “It was a place for them to perform in front of people ... It’s part of what sets the foundation for the Black queer literary movement or the Black queer cultural movement.”

Parkerson agrees, noting that much of the success achieved by herself, Hemphill, and many others may not have been possible without such a gathering space. Today, she says the legacy of ENIKAlley exists within the young, queer Black artists who continue to create groundbreaking work. She confirms the steering committee is currently talking about next steps and the possibility of making a full-length documentary and says if a second project is undertaken, she hopes to add more voices from the up-and-coming generation.

Jones notes, however, that sometimes, in the retelling of history, it’s easy to reframe the coffeehouse’s story as a response to AIDS, Ronald Reagan, and the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

But that, he says, often overlooks the artists’ drive to create and the joy that bloomed within the space and among the artists. “I mean, it was fun,” says Jones, recalling hours of rehearsing with Hemphill, where they would high-five one another with so much enthusiasm their palms ached. “It was tremendous fun. It was exciting.” Despite its cliché, Jones concludes that ENIKAlley was “world-making—that’s what it was. It was like a world unto itself.”

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washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 29

ARTS

Eastern Artket

By Jennie Chaplin Contributing Writer In late 2020, as the holidays approached and the coronavirus continued to spread, the crisp air and the bright colors at the Penn Quarter holiday market across from the National Portrait Gallery were a balm. By the end of the year, the nation was exhausted. Very little was safe. People craved communal, in-person experiences with art, but the pandemic had forced Smithsonian museums and smaller galleries alike to close. Something was missing from art such as music, movies, and television, as helpful as they were during self-isolation. I had already decided not to travel to see family, so I headed to the holiday market, hoping to find gifts that could connect me with loved ones, even though we were far apart.

On those blocks, more than 50 vendors sold repurposed jewelry, imported crafts, paintings, soap, and woodwork. I bought a repurposed necklace for my sister and, of course, two pendants for myself. I kept moving through the market, looking for other small gifts, until bold colors and crafted brushstrokes stopped me in my tracks. The booth showing the colorful artworks had a banner with the artist’s name: Rayhart, the mononym of D.C.-area visual artist Ray Hart. His name was also inscribed on a huge selection of unframed prints and framed acrylic originals on canvas, along with coasters, postcards, and wearable art such as T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, and purses.

I bought an unframed print, “Good Girl Coalition II,” which pictures three women with brown skin, all different heights and sizes, dressed in earth-tone brown and green, and highlighted with purple, mustard yellow, and red. Green is my mother’s favorite color; the painting reminded me of myself and my two sisters, standing in a coalition despite the distance forced upon us by the pandemic.

I was lost in his art before I noticed Rayhart himself in the background, letting his art “take center stage” and “speak for itself,” as he says.

Dressed for the December weather in his warm jacket, hat, and gloves, he greeted me and stood quietly. As we talked, I learned I could find him displaying his work on most Saturdays and Sundays at Eastern Market, which he had been doing, and continues to do, since 2018 and throughout the pandemic.

Sustaining any business—especially an art business—wasn’t easy over the past year. But businesses at Eastern Market had an advantage in the pandemic: an open air setting, which disperses droplets carrying the novel coronavirus and makes transmission less likely.

During the pandemic’s peak, Eastern Market

Darrow Montgomery

Two things kept local artist Rayhart selling during the pandemic: real connections with his patrons and outdoor markets.

Rayhart

remained a semi-stable cultural and social outlet. According to Keith A. Anderson, director of D.C.’s Department of General Services, in June 2020, Eastern Market was able to bring back all its arts and crafts vendors under a farmers market waiver. “The merchants and vendors at Eastern Market are here day after day,” Anderson says. “And with that consistency, friendships develop between them and their customers. So, even when only essential shopping was permitted in Washington, D.C., Eastern Market was a different type of essential shopping: It was where you could buy your essential foods and at the same time deepen that essential human connection.”

Rayhart began presenting his work at Eastern Market in 2015, but it wasn’t until 2018 that he started setting up an outdoor booth there on a regular basis. He compares his process for arranging pieces for his weekend exhibits to setting up a home. He aims to create a “welcoming, presentable” environment, he says, allowing his “inner voice to guide him” when deciding on how to display his items. His booth is furnished

30 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

with tables draped in black fabric, covered with a selection of unframed prints. One table features postcards and coasters, and behind them original artworks on canvas hang at eye level.

On the other side, wearable art hangs on racks.

Born and raised in Miami Beach, Rayhart came to D.C. in 1995. He was trained as a social worker, but he’s been creating art for almost three decades. Gifted a beginners paint set by a friend 29 years ago, he describes himself as a “self-taught artist, led by self-exploration and a passionate desire to master this thing called art creation.” But he’s not only a visual artist: “I believe that I am first and foremost, a poet, who believes in the preservation of good people, good poetry, and good paintings,” he says on his website. “My art will be poetry put to paint. And my aim is to capture and relay it in a poem visualized as a painting. Hence, painting will become my voice, and through it, I speak only in the language of love.” Rayhart’s website includes examples of his poetic voice: “An angel now, / Covered in dust / Just as my insides have begun to rust / Please surrender the secret,

/ And I’ll keep it between us.”

He’s rather unassuming and largely quiet— until he starts talking about his art. As he discusses his work, he becomes talkative and passionate. He tells me about pieces ranging from landscapes to human figures, sharing the background of and inspiration behind his paintings. With the inquisitiveness of a former museum docent, I ask him how he conceptualizes his painting. “Life itself is the theme,” Rayhart says, comparing his art to “feelgood” music. His art depicts something personal: “My appreciation for life,” he says. “My life itself.”

He sees inspiration as “coming from the universe.” In addition, “It significantly honors the people who have sacrificed for the lives we enjoy today,” he adds.

Zita Cousens, owner of the Cousen Rose Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Rayhart’s work was shown in July, says his work is especially human. “He depicts musicians, women, family, and children, all subjects that appeal to people because of how he portrays them,” she says. “There’s motion

ARTS Courtesy of Rayhart

THE 5TH DIMENSION

PAUL THORN

MAR 3

A woman looks through Rayhart’s work at Eastern Market

APR 27

DAMIEN JURADO OKKERVIL RIVER (SOLO)

KAYHAN KALHOR NOV 10

OCT 2

in his paintings even if someone is just sitting on a chair. He also doesn’t have defined faces on his paintings, so that the viewer can see himself or herself in his paintings, or relate to a moment in time that he has painted, such as a woman playing the piano or a woman strolling on a path.”

Recently, the National Institutes of Health, coordinating with the National Institute of Mental Health, sent postcards to D.C., Maryland, and Virginia residents asking them to participate in online questionnaires to ascertain “how stressors related to the COVID-19 virus affect mental health over time,” according to the website. On the front was Rayhart’s artwork—women and a girl wearing vivid colors, pink, purple, yellow, blue, orange, all joined together—titled “Get Behind Us.” The commission came after a couple of NIH colleagues came across his work, like many others, at the holiday market in Penn Quarter downtown and Eastern Market.

Though he’s frequently seen at Eastern Market, his work can be found at other regional outdoor spaces—the Reston Market, spaces in Annapolis, and more. Barbara Luke, a Virginia native and retired bank executive who has collected his art since 2010, first encountered him at an F Street marketplace, she says.

She’s been collecting African American art for about two decades, and meeting and interacting with artists such as Rayhart is one of her favorite parts of that process. “I am attracted to the color and vibrancy of Ray’s art,” she says.

“Not only are the figurative images in the forefront of his paintings appealing, but the use of color in the background offers the feeling that I am actually purchasing a dual piece of art showing both figurative and abstract art on the same canvas.”

Most notably, his wearable art—T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, and purses—serve as traveling art exhibits. “Rayhart meets the two most important criteria of a successful business owner at Eastern Market: He creates beautiful artwork that truly touches people, and he has a personality that matches,” says Anderson.

“On top of that, he is an extremely astute

businessman. This third element becomes clear when you meet one of his fans who owns a wardrobe of Rayhart apparel.”

Barbara Stoney and her dau ghter, Yolanda Cousar, who met R ayhart at Eastern Market over a year ago, are now regular patrons of his art. Rayhart is “talented and personable,” Stoney says. “I feel he possesses a sense of familiarity when communicating with his customers.” Although Rayhart’s art appeals to a wide variety of people, for Stoney, the art has cultural and racial significance: It evokes a sense of pride. She’d owned Black art before, but never Black wearable art; now Stoney wears the “Ms. Sunday Morning” jacket and Cousar matches her in “A Morning Solo” jacket. Stoney wears Rayhart’s art when making trips throughout the area: “The sales associate in Home Depot wanted to know who and where was the artist located,” she says. “Rayhart’s wearable art is so powerful and mesmerizing.”

Donna Wiseman and her husband, John Norris, have acquired at least five originals on canvas over a period of four to five years.

Wiseman and Norris, both academics, have collected oil paintings, watercolors, woodprints, and sculptures over the past 30 years.

“We were walking down the sidewalk at Annapolis First Sunday and his artwork pulled us into his tent,” Wiseman says. Like Stoney and Cousar, the couple believes that Rayhart’s personality comes through in his work. “We can say all the typical reasons why we like his art—colors, subject matter, themes, styles, etc.—but the overriding reason is Rayhart’s spirit and approach to life that is also depicted in his art,” Wiseman says.

In the past year and a half, those connections have been as important to his work as the practicality of his open air booth. Next, Rayhart plans to “continue to serve the people through his art.” But for now, he’s continuing to connect with people at Eastern Market.

Rayhart’s advice to those pursuing art as a profession? “Be patient and consistent,” he says.

“All which is good takes time. If it’s overnight and successful, you must know, that day came after many nights of enduring work.”

BUSH/MARSHALL/MEYER/MEYER

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ARTS BOOKS

Raising Spirits Seeing Ghosts

By Kat Chow Grand Central Publishing, 368 pages

Hours after Kat Chow’s mother , her uncle gathers her and her two sisters in his arms and tells the trio that nothing has changed.

“OK,” the sisters say, echoing each other in the embrace. Their uncle probably means this as a consolation, to reassure them that they still have family who will love and care for them. But what he says is also a denial—of the trauma of losing a mother at a young age, of the shifts that will inevitably occur in the wake of their pain, and of the strange, capricious nature of grief.

In Seeing Ghosts, Chow (formerly of NPR and its Code Switch podcast) reckons with all the unspoken ways her family warped and adapted in mourning, reconstructing her mother’s life and death through dim memories, dreams, and fragmented stories. Her mother, Bo Mui (or Florence), is a specter summoned as Chow unwraps her mother’s old jewelry box on her birthday, or when the gravestone she designed with her sisters is delivered in the wrong shade of red. As she probes her family and herself about the cost of avoiding the fact of her mother’s death for years, Chow plays an extended game of hideand-seek with a ghost.

She’s also conducting something akin to archeological research, using census data and historical anecdotes to furnish the context of her family’s emigration and fraught relationship with death and grief. Posed photographs could contain clues, if Chow only studies them hard enough. Many times, without a way to corroborate a feeling (is there ever?), Chow is forced to speculate on a character’s thought process. She also has to leave many questions unanswered: Would her father have parented a son differently than he did his daughters? Was her mother happy? Sometimes, another family member reveals the motive behind an interaction decades later. This unspooling is long and arduous, full of contradictions and opaque conclusions. As a result, the book requires patience—and also re-creates the uncanny experience of grief. Each page finds Chow peeling back the layers that mummify the thing closest to the truth, brushing away the dust to reveal the bone beneath.

Wing Shek, Chow’s father and Bo Mui’s husband, is the most inscrutable figure. Unable (or unwilling) to answer basic questions about how he met his wife, he is impassive for the whole of Chow’s adolescence. Home alone together during her teenage years before she goes off to college, Chow and her father are each other’s foils: one perpetually searching, the other apparently content, no qualms about forsaking the past in order to move forward. It’s a frustrating dynamic, and yet their grief, which is also generational and racial, is entwined, as is their healing. In the book’s most satisfying narrative

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turn, Wing Shek emerges as the protagonist of his own crusade to (literally) unearth his heritage. Thanks to him, an unknown becomes known, and it feels like a triumph.

The gape-mouthed fish that graces the U.S. cover of Seeing Ghosts is courtesy of Wing Shek, an allusion to a souvenir from a fishing trip that he decided to taxidermy. (Chow’s parents were preoccupied with the art of preservation—Bo Mui once joked that she might like to be stuffed and displayed in death.) It’s also an example of how Chow uses food in Seeing Ghosts, tacitly examining how it shapes grief, memory, and culture. She recalls clandestine Burger King drives with her mother to split extralarge orders of fries (which she mentions at the funeral, to her sister Steph’s dismay), and gai lan soaking in the sink during Lunar New Year preparations. There’s the melted ice cream cake her father presents for her 15th birthday, his earnest continuation of a tradition her mother started, and the steamed eggs she and her sisters share on a trip to their father’s childhood home in Guangzhou. In an imagined conversation, Chow and her mother discuss everything they ate that day in Cantonese, though Chow isn’t fluent.

At one point, applying scholar Anne Anlin Cheng’s idea of the “melancholic” that “eats” and “feeds” on the thing that is lost, Chow wonders if instead of preserving her mother, she is preserving herself. What is she holding on to as she immerses herself in the thing that causes her the most pain? Grief keeps her estranged from herself, but perhaps it also binds her together.

Paradoxically, it displaces her and also connects her to ancestors; it provokes her to write a memoir and make discoveries about her family. Although the end of Seeing Ghosts in no way marks a resolution, Chow does arrive at something like a calibration: She recognizes when to find her mother’s ghost, and when to let her go.

—Amy Guay

ARTS FILM

Dark and Stormy Nights

The Night House Directed by David Bruckner In recent years, haunted houses have become an easy way to depict grief on screen.

As an example, Netflix has dipped into this well multiple times: The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and His House have all used ghosts and creepy homes as metaphors for psychological turmoil. It is a smart trick, since those without recent grief can be loath to discuss it, and genre trappings make the topic more palatable. The Night House continues in that tradition and makes it more explicit: It is immediately about grief and loss, and the protagonist is always self-aware. Because it is a horror film, it is also occasionally creepy and prone to jarring noises, but it’s astute. There is more empathy and depth than the genre typically requires.

The first few minutes unfold in virtual silence.

Director David Bruckner films inside the house; we see Beth (Rebecca Hall) having a conversation with an older woman, but we can barely hear them. Beth is dressed in all black, and the older woman hands her a casserole. We are pretty sure she’s just gotten home from her husband Owen’s funeral, and one flourish confirms it: She throws the casserole in the trash. Beth is a schoolteacher who goes through the motions of her job, except her mind is obviously elsewhere.

She has friends and neighbors who care for her, but she is so despondent and disconnected that she cannot really engage. Of course, it doesn’t help that Owen haunts the gorgeous lakeside house where she lives. Beth quickly suspects Owen’s spirit has some unfinished business, so she looks into his private life. It turns out there is a lot she did not know about.

Owen died suddenly and unexpectedly by suicide, so there is rage and confusion mixed in with Beth’s grief. Hall is the right actor for this material: She has a nervy energy and a way of looking through other actors, appalled that they cannot see how she feels. Beth hides and nurses her grief—she feels it is hers alone, something she tends like a garden—and Hall finds emotional realism that makes the supernatural horror all the more convincing. The climax ends as it must, with Beth reckoning with her grief in a more open way, and the early tension lays the

groundwork for the outward emotional release.

Along with screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, Bruckner pays more attention to Beth than the house that haunts her. In a weird way, that makes the scares all the more effective. The film’s success as a character-driven drama obscures that it also wants to scare us.

Her psychology dovetails cleanly with The Night House’s visual language. Bruckner and his editor, David Marks, are deliberate about whether the camera acts like an objective or subjective observer. They need to be careful about that line because, well, it is scary to not know what version of reality we are seeing. Early in the film, there is a lengthy dialogue scene where Beth gets drunk with her colleagues, and the camera pushes on her face once she gets home and gradually falls asleep. The scene becomes a literal nightmare in an instant, ensuring the audience is never quite comfortable with what we see. Unlike many other haunted house films, the nature of the supernatural entity is difficult to pin down. Beth thinks she communes with Owen’s soul, except that is not quite right. The true nature of what she experiences is more disturbing and existential than that.

Not everything in this film is a success. There is a subplot involving Owen’s extracurricular activities that leaves more questions than answers, and Beth does not contend with them in a plausible way. Putting that aside, the fallout from Beth’s grief is where The Night House truly succeeds. Every person in a relationship must wonder whether they truly know their partner, and the ghosts in this film make that poignantly literal.

It is a common trope in haunted house films to have the protagonist question their reality, to have the supporting characters tell them they are crazy. The Night House has a clever inversion of that trope, a final image that might be worth the price of admission. Beth looks at something, convinced of its exact nature, but it is elusive enough that the viewer may not necessarily see what she does. This image will cause arguments among friends and loved ones who watch this film together. It takes nerve to end a film like this, and while the audience may not have a clean answer, Beth has hers.

—Alan Zilberman The Night House is in theaters starting Aug. 20.

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washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 33

Vivien Goldman

By Alexesie Pinnock

In 1981, pioneering UK music journalist and occasional backup singer Vivien Goldman released her first record, Dirty Washing, a three-song effort showcasing her distinct soprano and feminist lyrics supported by echoed reggae rhythms and postpunk guitar. This critically acclaimed limited release reflected the times with mentions of unemployment, police brutality, and skinhead violence, and showcased the cutting-edge playing of Aswad bassist George “Levi” Oban. Over the next few years, Goldman recorded a few more songs, but eventually tired of the industry and switched gears. Since then, she has created a global music television show (Big World Café), authored numerous books on reggae, punk, and Bob Marley, and has taught music courses at New York University and Rutgers. Lecturing earned her the nickname “the punk professor.” Now, 40 years after her first record, Goldman has released a debut album, Next Is Now, produced by Killing Joke bassist and producer Youth. Why now? Goldman told City Paper that the success of Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982), a retrospective collection of her music, as well as Pitchfork’s inclusion of her 1981 song “Private Armies” in its 2016 article “The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs,” led people to ask her to perform. She decided more material was needed. Youth, who she’s known since the 1970s when they went to all-night after-parties, created foundational music tracks melding postpunk, dub, and pop for Goldman’s lyrics and melodies. Recorded pre-COVID, the album touches on Brexit, immigration issues, and, on the title track, how “the memories of certain people” have you “wanting to manifest them in your own life in some way.” Goldman notes that in many ways life is even harder now than it was in 1981, but her songs carry a tinge of positivity because “you have to hang on to your hope and happiness somehow … otherwise you could be dragged down and bogged down and never achieve anything.”

Vivien Goldman performs with Dunia & Aram, doors open at 6:30 p.m. at Rhizome DC, 6950 Maple St. NW. rhizomedc.org. $5–$20.

—Steve Kiviat

34 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

City Lights

Femme Fatale DC Open Market Before pop-up shops and local maker markets were all the rage, there was Femme Fatale DC. The grassroots retail venture, coowned by women of color Cee Smith and Adriana Mendoza, has been around since 2016 with the intention of shaking up shopping. Currently located in Cleveland Park, at the business’ sixth pop-up location, Femme Fatale DC offers immersive retail as well as a gathering space to bring makers and movers and shakers together. The store, which can be shopped in person or online, features more than 70 products from locally connected women and nonbinary entrepreneurs. The venture stands out, however, for its commitment to helping other women and nonbinary creators grow. “We believe that collaboration, autonomy, and collective effort are more powerful than competing,” says Briget Heidmous, Femme Fatale DC’s community facing product manager and strategist. “We are a community of empowered individuals working together.” Since opening, the venture has worked with more than 250 entrepreneurs; some have stayed since the beginning, while others have gone on to launch their own shops. One such success story is Mz. Eclectic, the upcycled fashion brand by Ebony Brown. Heidmous explains that Femme Fatale DC aims to be a “launchpad” where creators can create while growing their business. “We have created spaces and opportunities for small and micro-businesses that inspire, disrupt wage and access disparities, and embolden retail entrepreneurs,” Heidmous writes over email. As for the pop-up side, Femme Fatale DC focuses on activating latent space that can work as an event space as much as storefront.

At its current location, Femme Fatale DC hosts events weekly, including tarot readings, happy hours, parties, and workshops.

On Aug. 22, Femme Fatale DC will put on an open air market with skin care products, jewelry, upcycled vintage goods, and more, as well as an indigo dyeing workshop (register for that in advance). Tarot readings will be available inside and DJ M$NP will help set the vibe. The pop-up departs the Connecticut Avenue NW storefront on Oct. 1. The open market runs from noon to 4 p.m. on Aug. 22 at Femme Fatale DC, 3409 Connecticut Ave. NW. femmefataledc.com. Free.

—Sarah Marloff

City Lights

National Capital Virtual Puppetry Festival Like so many art forms, the pandemic required theater artists to invent new ways of working within a virtual environment, but puppeteers were uniquely suited for the challenge. “Puppetry is a visual medium to start with,” says Alex Vernon over speakerphone. “Puppeteers are already thinking of ideas as objects.”

Sarah Olmsted Thomas expands upon the thought, noting that, because puppeteers wear so many hats, they were prepared to take on the camera. “Puppetry [breathes] life into objects that are otherwise lifeless—though just paper, wood, or foam, [they] see a character with personality and emotions.” Vernon and Thomas are known to local audiences as the puppet theater company Alex & Olmsted; they’re also two-fifths of the clown troupe Happenstance Theater. Together, they sit on the board of the National Capital Puppetry Guild (Thomas is vice president). Starting the evening of Aug. 19, the Guild will host its second National Capital Virtual Puppetry Festival. “We felt that we should take money in the Guild treasury and create employment opportunities for artists,” says Thomas, explaining how the festival originated in the first year of the pandemic. “We were taking a chance, but it brought in artists and enthusiasts from around the world.” The four-day event will feature performances and workshops from local artists, as well as an international contingent hailing from Italy, Mexico, and Canada.

Expect marionettes and hand puppets along with toy theater and crankies. Workshops will range from performance to construction, diversity, educational, and therapeutic puppetry.

Vernon hopes the festival will present a “holistic approach to all aspects of puppetry.” The National Capital Virtual Puppetry Festival runs Aug. 19–22. national capitalpuppetry.org. Some performances are free, passes $20–$25.

—Ian Thal

By Briget Heidmous, courtesy of Femme Fatale DC

City Lights

Photo Courtesy of the National Capital Puppetry Guild

CITY LIGHTS

Spotify’s Sunday Dinner: DMV “Some of the most talented artists come from D.C. and they deserve shine and support just as much as amazing artists from other places,” says local soul artist Ari Lennox in a statement to City Paper. Lennox is referring to Spotify’s recent spotlight on the DMV’s innovative Black artists, Sunday Dinner: DMV. Released on Aug. 3, the seven-minute documentary features Rico Nasty, Anwan “Big G” Glover, Pusha T, and Lennox in a conversation with DJ and Spotify Black Music Editor Domo Wells on the “ripple effect of DMV music.” Directed by dayday, a Brooklyn-based, queer Black multidisciplinary artist, the film poetically jumps from warm, colorful shots of the intimate Sunday dinner party to black-and-white scenes of D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, interspersing snippets of the insightful conversation with tracks by local artists. It plays like a multi-person love letter to the region, spanning “the 757”—eastern Virginia à la Virginia Beach—“to Baltimore.” But, like any good love story, it’s not without adversity. The artists share stories of coming up in a region known for its tough love. A singer from a young age, Lennox talks about her fight for a solo with her church choir as a child. “That’s literally DMV—it’s not easy, but you need that shit,” she says. Rico agrees; later in the film, the self-described rapper, mom, and “sometimes” fashionista bemoans D.C.’s lack of support for the city’s talent, asking where the recording studios and high school musical engineering programs are. “This is a musical city,” says Rico. “We should embrace that. We should feed that and put that in our children.” The creators also shout out the region’s various up-and-comers, including 15-year-old Leeto from Woodbridge, Virginia, and Baltimore’s YTK. Baltimore, Pusha T and Wells insist, is “so hot right now.” In addition to the doc, Spotify has also curated a two-and-a-half-hour playlist of established and emerging DMV artists titled “Ripple Effect: DMV.” The Ripple Effect campaign seeks to showcase “under-the-radar artists and underserved genres exploding across cultural hubs within DMV, California, and Texas regions,” according to Spotify’s PR team.

As Big G concludes at the film’s end, “We just trying to bring those lights right to our city. We have everything here, we just have to push, and it starts right here at this table.” The film can be streamed via Spotify’s Ripple Effect: DMV playlist or YouTube. spotify.com. Free with membership.

—Sarah Marloff

City Lights

Awesome Con Up in the sky: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Awesome Con! The D.C. pop culture festival returns to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Aug. 20. The annual three-day event was canceled last year for the first time since it began in 2013, due to the pandemic, but now it’s back with a blast from the past—or is it

Rico Nasty; Photo Courtesy of Spotify

City Lights

Rico Nasty the future? Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, costars of the 1985 sci-fi classic Back to the Future, will make an appearance at the 2021 comic con. They’re also bringing with them the iconic time-traveling DeLorean for photo ops. Of course, Awesome Con features many other big and obscure names from the worlds of comics books, novels, movies, and television, such as The Addams Family’s Christina Ricci, Rocky and The Mandalorian star Carl Weathers, former Batman writer Tom King, and Sensational Wonder Woman writer Amy Chu. Fantasy fans who also double as science nerds will be especially stoked for Awesome Con’s Science Fair, an event dedicated to exploring the science that informs pop culture. Headlined by special effects expert and former Mythbusters star Adam Savage, the fair will offer lectures on different scientific theories along with displays by organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. The fair will also feature their popular “Ask a Scientist” booth where congoers can ask questions on any subject of scientific interest. “Awesome Con is thrilled to be returning back to an in-person and live event,” says Lauren Dabb from LeftField Media, the company putting on the con. Awesome Con runs from Aug. 20-22. awesome-con.com. $20–$90.

—Rick Horner

marijuana and pregnancy, and more. A high noon yoga class will open the fest for those looking to stretch and connect.

Discussions on policy are also scheduled throughout the day, and a Grow School will help would-be planters learn how to perfect that green thumb. “We use entertainment, education, and celebration to bring people together,” says Phillips. “We have as many advocacy groups exhibiting on the ground as we do cannabis-adjacent brands.” But it’s recommended that you come— or get—hungry while attending because the fest also features a Munchies Zone, with 50 different food vendors, including DC Slices, local taco trucks, and Ben & Jerry’s. “We have everything you need, sweet and savory, to treat people’s munchies,” says Phillips. Gates open at 12 p.m. at RFK Stadium, 2400 East Capitol St. SE. nationalcannabisfestival.com. $65.

—Hannah Doctor-Loeb

City Lights

National Cannabis Festival On Aug. 28, thousands of cannabis enthusiasts will descend on RFK Stadium for the National Cannabis Festival. Caroline Phillips, the event’s founder and executive producer, describes the fest as a “rock the boat event for the cannabis community.” The annual celebration returns for its fifth year with a concert featuring Method Man and Redman, as well as Young M.A, local go-go group Backyard Band, Antibalas, the Archives, Lee, Blackwood and Graham, and DJ Farrah Flosscett. Though this isn’t the first fest of its kind, Phillips says this year’s event will be different and special: “Coming out of the hiatus due to the COVID pandemic, we know that people really want to come together for a fun day. I hope that we can give people a day to really relax and celebrate.”

Aside from music, attendees can expect a ton of other offerings including panels on cannabis culture, decriminalization, washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 35

City Lights

Kesha and Betty Who

DCHFA, Your Homeownership Resource in the District.

The District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency is yourResource homeownership in the District.

DCHFA, Your DCHFA, Your Homeownership Homeownership Resource in the District. resource in the District from buying a home to retaining your home; we have a homeownership program to assist you.

After a year and a half of TikTok and staying home, it’s time to hit a place downtown where the

freaks all come around—a hole-in-the-wall, a dirty free-for-all—to experience the original “Tik DCHFA, Your Your Homeownership Homeownership Resource Resource in inthe theDistrict.

District.

DCHFA, Tok” party queen herself. With an assist from fellow dance-pop artist Betty Who, Kesha returns to

the District on Sept. 8, for the long-awaited part of her eastern U.S. tour, after the pandemic spoiled plans for North American shows to promote her 2020 album, High Road. Expect the Anthem’s cavhomeownership in the city. This program offers competitive ernous general admission area to transform into an electro-pop dance floor, as Kesha performs DCHFA, Your District. interestHomeownership rates and lower mortgage Resource insurance costsin on the first trust bops and ballads from High Road for her sweaty, club-deprived worshippers. Last year’s record saw DC Open Doors You are not required to be a first-time homebuyer mortgages.

DC Open Doors a return to Kesha’s Animal and Warrior roots of the past decade—the 2010s albums that turned or a D.C. resident to qualify for DCOD. You must, however, be her into an earworm machine. Previous set lists have included a good mix of classic Kesha and her purchasing a home in the District of Columbia. more recent soul-inspired work, such as “Praying,” “Bastards,” and “Hymn.” Mixed with whipDC MAP (Mortgage Assistance Program) COVID-19 is here to help smart lyrics and head-rocking synth beats from new songs like “Little Bit of Love” and “Raising Home Purchase Assistance Program (HPAP) Open Doors DistrictDC homeowners stay in their homes during this pandemic.

Hell,” Kesha is sure to deliver a cathartic night out after a grueling (and in some cases, disappointHPAP provides interest free deferred loans for down payment ing) #HotGirlSummer. Then there’s the additional layer of Betty Who’s synth-forward melodies and closing cost assistance up to $84,000 combined. DCHFA and heart-tugging lyrics—don’t be surprised if you cry a few times before the curtains close. Come serves as a co-administrator of this DC Department of Housing in your best bedazzled gear and remember to bring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test and Community Development’s (DHCD) first-time home buyer from the previous 72 hours; the Anthem, along with other IMP properties, is now implementing program.

DC MAP COVID-19 provides zero- interest monthly assistance loans up more stringent pandemic mitigation measures to keep this spiritual experience safe. The show toReverse $5,000 for up to six months for qualified Mortgage Insurance & Taxhomeowners.

Payment Program starts at 8 p.m. on Sept. 8 at the Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. theanthemdc.com. (202) 888-0020. $55.

(ReMIT) ReMIT provides financial assistance to seniors 62 —Christian Paz

DC Open Doors DC Open Doors is your key to DC Open Doors DC Open Doors

Do you need mortgage assistance due to the effects of COVID-19?

years or older who have fallen behind on insurance and tax Borrower Qualifications: payments as a result of their reverse mortgage. Qualified • Must be borrower’s primary residence and must be located in District homeowners can receive up to $25,000 in assistance. the District of Columbia • Must have been current as of the March 1st payment (prior to DC4ME DC4ME provides mortgage assistance with optional being affected by COVID-19) down payment assistance to D.C. government employees.

• Must be able to document income affected due to COVID-19 DC4ME is offered to current full-time District government • Borrower must be the borrower on the home loan, not just a employees, including employees of District government-based member of the household independent agencies, D.C. Public Charter • Must show proof that instrumentalities, the borrower is not eligible for and organizations, provided the applicant/borrower’s forbearance or other Schools, types of relief offered through the servicer and/or Hardest Hit Funds falls under the oversight of the Council of the District employer • If borrower is still affected after the CARES Act ends, then of Columbia. relief may be offered at that time (See additional terms)

City Lights

Block by Block: Naming Washington

Your morning commute may feel like a chore—the streets just a means of connecting you from A to B. But Leslie Ureña, the National Portrait Gallery’s curator of photographs, sees things a bit differently. In a press release for the Gallery’s new exhibit, Block by Block: Naming Washington, Ureña says, “The naming of streets and places creates a living history, connecting past to present.” This feels especially true in Washington, D.C., where many streets bear the names of historical figures.

DC MAP (Mortgage Assistance Program) COVID-19 Block by Block hopes to connect these namesake’s with their modern-day locations. For instance, DC MAP COVID-19 provides financial assistance to those For a fullafflist of borrower qualifications and loanpandemic. terms, visitQualified gallery visitors will see Mathew B. Brady’s portrait of Clara Barton alongside information about ected by the impacts of the COVID-19 the Clara Barton Parkway, off which sits the home of the American Red Cross founder. Similarly, borrowers can receive a loan of up to $5,000 per month to put a portrait of Malcolm X by an unidentified artist connects with today’s Malcolm X Park. Ureña toward their mortgage for up to six months. hopes that this exhibit will inspire D.C. residents to get a new appreciation for their city, and turn Visit www.DCHFA.org www.DCHFA.org Visit daily commutes into a communion with icons of decades and centuries past. All together, Block by how to apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership programs. how to apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership programs.

Visit www.DCHFA.org Block features 16 reproductions of portraits and is housed in the National Portrait Gallery’s Riley Visit www.DCHFA.org Visit www.DCHFA.org for full qualifi cation guidelines and information Visit www.DCHFA.org how to apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership programs.

Gallery. Other figures represented include astronomer Samuel Pierpont Langley, architect Raoul how to apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership programs. on how to apply of DCHFA’s homeownership programs. programs. howtotoany apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership Wallenberg, and Civil War officer David G. Farragut. Whether you are a history buff or looking to spark your curiosity, Block by Block promises to deliver. The exhibit runs through Jan. 16, 2023, at the National Portrait Gallery, 8th and G Streets NW. npg.si.edu. (202) 633-8300. Free.

DC MAP COVID-19 financial assistance will be granted on a first come, first served basis until the program allocation has been exhausted.

Homeowners seeking assistance through DC MAP COVID-19 and financial assistance will be granted on a first come, first served basis until the program allocation has been exhausted. HomeDC MAP COVID-19 should call 1-833-429-0537 to begin the process of applying. Questions regarding DC MAP COVID-19 may also be emailed to DCMAP@dchfa.org.

—Sarah Smith owners seeking assistance through DC MAP COVID-19 should call 202-667-7706 or DCMAP@housingetc.org to begin the process of applying.

www.dchfa.org/homeownership

36 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD

Dear Readers of Washington City Paper : Now, more than ever, we care how you feel. Really, we do.

We are once again asking for your favorite haunts, your favorite handyman, your favorite vegetarian joint, your favorite bike shop, and, of course, the things that got you through the pandemic. Let’s celebrate D.C. Let’s define what we love most about living here, in good times and bad. Let’s vote.

~ VOTE NOW! ~ August 19 - September 19 ~ Food Best Bagel Best Bakery Best BBQ Restaurant Best Brunch Best Burger Best Burmese Restaurant Best Caribbean Restaurant Best Chinese Restaurant Best Cupcake Best Doughnuts Best Dumplings Best Ethiopian Restaurant Best Falafel Best Fast Casual Dining Best Food Nonprofit Best Food Truck Best French Restaurant Best Fried Chicken Best Fries Best Gay Bar/Club/Lounge Best Gelato/Ice Cream Best Gluten-Free Menu Best Hangover Breakfast Best Indian Restaurant Best Italian Restaurant Best Japanese Restaurant Best Kabob Restaurant Best Kid-Friendly Restaurant Best Korean Restaurant Best Laotian Restaurant Best Late Night Eats Best Latin American Restaurant Best Local Soup Best Mexican Restaurant Best Middle Eastern Restaurant Best Mussels Best New Restaurant Best Pho Restaurant Best Pie Best Pizza Best Place to Buy Candy Best Place to Have Dinner with Live Music Best Pretzel Best Ramen Best Raw Bar Best Restaurant Best Restaurant with a View Best Salvadoran Restaurant Best Sandwich Best Seafood Restaurant Best Slice of Pizza Best Small Plates Best Soul Food Restaurant Best South American Restaurant Best Steak House Restaurant Best Taco Best Thai Restaurant Best Vegan/Vegetarian Restaurant Best Vietnamese Restaurant Best Wings

Drink Best Bar Best Bar with Games/Activities Best Beer Selection Best Bloody Mary Best Brew Pub Best Cocktail Bar Best Coffee Shop

Best Distillery Best Dive Bar Best Happy Hour Best Irish Pub Best Kombucha Best Local Brewery Best Local Winery Best Margarita Best Neighborhood Bar Best New Bar Best Outdoor Bar with TVs Best Rooftop Bar Best Sports Bar Best Trivia Bar Best Whiskey Selection Best Wine Bar

Arts & Entertainment Best Art Class Best Art Collective Best Arts and Culture Nonprofit Best Commercial Art Gallery Best Dance Company Best Film Festival Best First Date Activity Best Go-go Band Best Karaoke Best Local Choral Group Best Local Cover Band Best Local Original Band Best Movie Theater Best Museum Tour/Exhibit Best Music Venue Best Outdoor Movie Series Best Outdoor Venue Best Performance Artist Best Place for Adult Entertainment Best Place For Tearing Up the Dance Floor Now That We Are Vaccinated Best Recording Studio Best Theater Company Best Twitch DJ Best Visual Artist Arts and Culture Festival We Missed Most Comedy Venue We Missed Most Jazz/Blues Venue We Missed Most Museum Art Gallery We Missed Most Music Festival We Missed Most Neighborhood Festival We Missed Most Performing Arts Venue We Missed Most

Health & Beauty Best Barre Studio Best Beauty Store Best Cannabis Dispensary Best Childbirth Services Best Chiropractor Best CrossFit Gym Best Dance Class Best Dentist Best Doctor Best Eye Doctor Best Facial Best Gym Best Hair Salon Best Hair Stylist

Best HIIT Studio Best Hospital Best Hot Yoga Best Indoor Cycling Studio Best Makeup Artist Best Mani/Pedi Best Martial Arts Classes Best Med Spa Best Personal Trainer (Gym) Best Personal Trainer (Non-Gym Individual Person) Best Physical Therapy Best Pilates Studio Best Place for Adventure Sports Best Place for Hair Removal Best Plastic Surgeon Best Spa Best Tattoo Parlor Best Therapeutic Massage Best Threading Best Yoga Instructor Best Yoga Studio

Best Internet Provider Best Landscape/ Garden Designer Best Lawyer Best Maid Service Best Money Management Services Best Movers Best Pet Groomer Best Pet Services Best Photography Services Best Place to Get Your Bike Fixed Best Place to Get Your Cracked Phone Screen Fixed Best Plumber Best Real Estate Agent Best Real Estate Group Best Ride Share Best Roofers Best Shared Work Space Best Vet

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GET THE F OUT

By Brendan Emmett Quigley

Across 1. Robbins’ business partner 7. Killer who makes a huge splash 11. One ISO DJF, maybe 14. Dedicatee of the Parthenon 15. Actual 16. Tazo drink 17. Words said about a tool while raising a glass?

19. “Me! This guy!”

20. Loans on some property 21. Ancient Peruvian 22. Abbr. before a subject 23. Totally with it 24. Cheer on during an NBA game?

26. Doing work, briefly 28. Differently ___ (challenged) 29. Bullshitters on pot?

35. Cádiz city 37. A year of living Spanishly 38. Really, really stupid 40. Greek egg starter

12. Identifying answer on a classic 1978 punk album 13. The Penitent playwright David 18. Word that means “ten” in Swedish and “uncle” in Spanish 22. Castaway’s temporary home 24. Scoring stats.

25. Obsequious 27. Like cold hands?

29. Keeps 30. Goal 31. “We’re living our best lives” 32. Goal 33. Cell substance 34. Lines on the bottom line: Abbr.

36. Red nose cause 39. Small drinks 42. Say roughly 44. Sporting brand with an alligator 46. Piece that maintains distance 48. The First 48 channel 49. See eye to eye 50. Hard up 51. Thing in a bundle you might buy from a record label 53. Actor Elgort 54. Political attitude 55. Sleepwear 58. Big on the front 60. Letters on an Ocean Potion bottle 61. “Lets try something ___”

41. Outdoor concert canceler 43. Penn and Teller’s spoils?

45. Cheese plate cheeses 47. Grp. replenishing classroom supplies 48. Gasps for air made while jittery?

52. Collection of hams, maybe?

56. “Take ___ from me” 57. Steve who plays King Shark in The Suicide Squad 58. Game played with three cards 59. Game played with a pile of sticks 60. Examine Syria’s Bashar methodically?

62. Govt. agency that regulates handling nuclear materials 63. Leaked 64. Give new life to 65. 40% of 99?

66. Glenn of the Eagles 67. Simple to use

Down 1. Cries and cries 2. Pair of hearts 3. Glimmer 4. 30 Rock page 5. Company abbrs.

6. “Doesn’t work for me” 7. Town where the The Maine Campus newspaper is run 8. Flinch, say 9. Melon with a yellow rind 10. Computer key that appears twice on a keyboard 11. Total flop % $ & +

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washingtoncitypaper.com august 2021 37

DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE

VOTE UNTIL

SEPT 19!

Is it ever OK to stop being GGG? I’ve been with my husband for 26 years. Shortly after we got together, my husband disclosed a major kink: MMF threesomes. I was young and a virgin and up for anything then, but we didn’t start hooking up with other men until around year six of our relationship. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been on and off with this. We had children, we took a break, and we found the time to go wild now and then. My husband’s interests expanded into dominance play—owning me and sharing me— but I’m in my late 40s now and my husband is in his 50s. I’m approaching menopause and my sex drive has decreased. There were also instances where I was basically sexually assaulted—or at the very least, my boundaries were not respected on more than one occasion. Long story short, I want to be done being kinky. I want my body to be mine. My husband and I have been having other marital problems, and he thinks my rejection of his kinkiness is a rejection of him. I’ve told him I’m still interested in sex, I’m just tired of being GGG. He says he isn’t interested in vanilla sex with me because he is “disappointed.”

When I told him to outsource his kink, he said, “Good luck finding that as a married man.” Am I ever allowed to retire from his kink? Am I the asshole here?

—My Years Being Obedient Done First and most importantly, if your husband stood by and did nothing while your boundaries were violated in front of him—or if he violated your boundaries himself—then there’s an asshole in this marriage, MYBOD, and it ain’t you.

But seeing as you’re still with your husband and still interested in having vanilla sex with him, I’m going to assume your husband recognized how he failed you on those occasions when you were violated and that he’s shown remorse, apologized specifically and profusely, and made whatever changes he needed to make for you to feel safe with him. If he’s done none of those things—if he hasn’t done all of those things— you should leave him.

Zooming out for new readers: GGG stands for “good, giving, game.” As in, “good in bed, giving of pleasure, and game for anything— within reason.” I believe we should be GGG for our partners and that our partners should be GGG for us. But being GGG does not mean doing whatever your partner wants. That’s why the final G has always come with that italicized-for-emphasis qualifier: “game for anything—within reason.” Being game means recognizing your partner will have sexual interests that you don’t share and being up for giving those things a try—so long as they’re reasonable. “Reasonable” is a subjective standard, of course, and we all get to decide for ourselves what may or may not be reasonable.

Back to you, MYBOD. A kink for MFM threesomes is not a thing for feet or light spanking.

It’s a big ask. And if your husband knew he needed MFM threesomes to feel sexually fulfilled, sharing that when he did—early in the relationship—was the right thing for him to do.

He laid his kink cards on the table before you got married, before you had kids, and when you could easily walk away. You didn’t walk away.

You told him you were open to the idea—you told him you were one of those rare “up for anything” virgins—and he didn’t rush you into anything. Six years went by before you had your first

38 august 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

threesome. And while MFM threesomes probably aren’t something you would’ve sought out on your own, MYBOD, I’m hoping you enjoyed some of them—you know, the ones that didn’t involve boundary violations so egregious that you experienced them not as sexual adventures you were having with your husband, but as sexual assaults your husband participated in and Jesus Fucking Christ on the Cross.

In all honesty, MYBOD, I’m having a hard time getting past those boundary violations.

But seeing as you got past them—seeing as

fact that you’re married is a selling point for many couples seeking thirds. (A married or partnered man is seen as less threatening for obvious reasons.) And I don’t know if you’ve been online recently, but hot daddies are very much in demand these days, and dominant daddies get a lot of play. Your wife isn’t taking your kink from you. She’s telling you to get this need met elsewhere. You are not being wronged. Stop being a baby and an ingrate. Jesus!

—Dan Savage

“You’re not obligated to have kinky sex with your husband, MYBOD, your husband is not obligated to have vanilla sex with you.” you’re still interested in being with your husband—I’m going to assume he somehow made things right and advise you accordingly. If he didn’t make things right, disregard my advice and divorce the motherfucker already.

Alright, you asked me if you can stop being GGG, MYBOD, and my answer is no. I think you should continue being GGG. That doesn’t mean you have to continue having MMF threesomes with your husband. You can decide you’re done with that—you can take them off the menu permanently—while still being GGG in other ways.

You’re also allowed to be done with Dom/sub play. (Your husband never owned you and your body was never his to share. That was naughty dirty talk you indulged in, not a deed of sale you have to honor.) And doing what you’re doing— giving your partner permission to get a specific sexual need met elsewhere—is one way a person can be GGG. There’s this need, this kink of his, that’s important to him—so important he brought it up early on—and you met that need for a long time but can’t meet it anymore. But you’re good enough, giving enough, and game enough to give him your blessing to get his kink on with other people. So you haven’t stopped being GGG. You’re being GGG in a different way now.

And just as you’re not obligated to have kinky sex with your husband, MYBOD, your husband is not obligated to have vanilla sex with you. If you think he’s withholding sex right now because he’d disappointed, well, maybe you can see how it might be disappointing and give him a little time to get over it. But if, on the other hand, you think he’s withholding sex to manipulate you into having threesomes again, MYBOD, that’s a deeply shitty thing to do and you should leave him.

P. S. Please show t his to you r husband, MYBOD: Dude. GET OVER YOUR DISAPPOINTMENT ALREADY. You had a good run. I hope you’re grateful and that you found some way to make up for boundary violations. Assuming you did, the sooner you stop fucking sulking and start fucking looking, the sooner you’ll find couples seeking male thirds.

You know those couples are out there because you and your wife used to be one of those couples. And far from being a stumbling block, the

I’m freshly out of a relationship and new to Grindr and I’m realizing that for me to get hard, I need slow kissing, I need to vibe to music, and especially need a soft touch on my dick. Too many guys pull on it with no lube and that makes me go soft. Slowly kissing to a chill song is my jam. Also, my dick is sensitive near the bottom of the shaft and I need wet fingers to go all the way down to the base of my dick in order to come. Is there a quicker way to describe this? Is lowon-the-shaft stimulation called something? Is there a term for this or a name for me? Or do I need to send a paragraph to all the tricks I message?

—Very Into Being Erect That’s called the way you like it, VIBE. Alternately, it’s called what works for you, what makes your dick hard, and what gets you off. The precise way you like it—the kissing that works for you, the music that puts you in the mood, the spot on your dick that puts you over the edge— doesn’t have a name, VIBE, and it doesn’t need one. But who knows? By this time next week, the way you like it could have a name and a pride flag and a bunch of online cis het allies ready to shout down anyone who isn’t convinced the slow-kissme-vibe-to-chill-music-touch-the-base-of-mylubed-up-cock community needed a name and its own float in the pride parade.

But just as you don’t really need a pride flag, VIBE, you don’t need to send a FAQ and an NDA to each potential trick you message on Grindr.

All you’ve got to do is tell the guy who shows up at your apartment that you’re into soft kissing—the music you like can already be playing—and then show him how you like your dick stroked. The guys yanking your dick without lube aren’t trying to make you go soft. They’re making their best guess about what might work for you, a guess most likely informed by what works for them and other guys.

I promise you, VIBE, the guys from Grindr aren’t pulling on your dick maliciously. Quite to the contrary, VIBE, your gentleman callers are pulling on your dick with the best of intentions. Offer those gentlemen some cheerful, constructive feedback in the moment, VIBE, and most will start stroking your dick just the way you like it.

—DS Email your Savage Love questions to mail@savagelove.net

CLASSIFIEDS LEGAL CONNECTIVITY WIRELESS (CW) is proposing to install several distributed antenna system (DAS) antennas on various buildings located at The Wharf & Fish Market at 1000-1100 Maine Street SW in Washington DC. CW invites comments from any interested party on the impact of the proposed action on any districts, sites, buildings, structures or objects signi�icant in American history, archaeology, engineering or culture that are listed or determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and/or speci�ic reason the proposed action may have a signi�icant impact on the quality of the human environment. Speci�ic information regarding the project is available by calling Darren Allen 904686-1027 during normal business hours. Comments must be received by September 21, 2021. Comments may also be mailed to CW at 2707 Main Street in Duluth, GA 30096, attn: Darren Allen.

FRIENDSHIP PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS VARIOUS SERVICES Friendship Public Charter School Is Seeking Bids From Prospective Vendors To Provide: * Equipment used in the preparation of foods provided to students as part of the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs.

Delivery of the equipment to identified site, installation, removal, and disposal of existing equipment. * Covid 19 testing services from licensed vendors with high quality laboratory services for 24 to 48 hour results turn around.

The competitive RFP can be found on FPCS website at: http://www.friendshipschools.org/procurement . Proposals are due no later than 4:00 P.M., EST, Friday September 10 2021. Questions and Proposals should be submitted on-line at: Procurementinquiry@friendshipschools.org . All bids not addressing all areas as outlined in the RFP will not be considered. No proposals will be accepted after the deadline.

SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2021 ADM 000710 Name of Decedent, Carol Elizabeth Geisler. Name and Adress of Attorney, James F. Warren, Esq., 3331 Resevoir Road NW, Washington, DC 20007.

Notice of Appointment, Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Sarah Adrian Geisler, whose address is 1651 34th Street, NW, Washington,

DC 20007, was appointed Personal Representative of the estate of Carol Elizabeth Geisler who died on September 15, 2020, without a Will and will serve without Court Supervision.

All unknown heirs and heirs whose whereabouts are unknown shall enter their appearance in this proceeding. Objections to such appointment shall be �iled with the Register of Wills, D.C., 515 5th Street, N.W., Building A, 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001, on or before 2/19/2022.

Claims against the decedent shall be presented to the undersigned with a copy to the Register of Wills or to the Register of Wills with a copy to the undersigned, on or before 2/19/2022, or be forever barred. Persons believed to be heirs or legatees of the decedent who do not receive a copy of this notice by mail within 25 days of its publication shall so inform the Register of Wills, including name, address and relationship. Date of �irst publication: 8/19/2021 Name of Newspaper and/ or periodical: Washington City Paper/Daily Washington Law Reporter. Name of Personal Representative: Sarah Adrian Geisler TRUE TEST copy Nicole Stevens Acting Register of Wills Pub Dates: August 19, September 16, October 7.

WASHINGTON GLOBAL PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE: REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Washington Global Public Charter School in accordance with section 2204(c) of the District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 solicits proposals for legal services relative to the re�inancing of approximately $6MM in facility debt. The re�inancing may include either a loan from a commercial bank, a nonpro�it lender, or a non-profit direct lender that leverages tax-exempt bonds of the underlying loans.

Proposal Submission A Portable Document Format (pdf) election version of your 5-page proposal must be received by the school no later than 4:00 p.m. EST on Friday, September 3. Proposals should be emailed to bids@ washingtonglobal.org.

No phone call submission or late responses please.

Interviews, samples, demonstrations will be scheduled at our request after the review of the proposals only and if required.

Quali�ied parties shall provide a description of the �irm; roles, quali�ications, billing rate, and experience with similar engagements, speci�ically with public charter schools; three customer references; and other material terms and conditions.

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSING AUTHORITY REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS (RFP) SOLICITATION NO.: 0015-2021 FIRE ALARM and SECURITY SYSTEMS & ACCESS CONTROL PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE and REPAIR SERVICES The District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) requires Preventive Maintenance and Repair Services of Fire Alarm and Security Systems & Access Control at various DCHA public housing properties.

SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS will be available beginning Monday, August 9, 2021 on DCHA’s website at www. dchousing.org under “Business” and “Solicitations”. SEALED PROPOSAL RESPONSES ARE DUE ON OR BEFORE Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 12:00 PM. Email LaShawn Mizzell McLeod, Contract Specialist at LMMCLEOD@ dchousing.org with copy to business@dchousing.org for additional information

Housing 1.5 BDR-BASEMENT APARTMENT for rent in house to share, furnished, no smoking, close to metro. (443) 808-7994 HYATTSVILLE ROOM FOR RENT: Quiet Neighborhood, Close to Metro, Furnished, NS, Off Street Parking, $575/mo. utIls. incl. (443) 808-7994 LARGE ONE BR END-UNIT CONDO in Alexandria for rent. $1575. All utilities included. 2nd floor in four story older building The Seasons. On site parking; pool. Complex is along HW395 half way between Potomac and Beltway. Jim 703-625-0095

Employment Statistics: Data Scientist – Optoro, Inc. – Washington DC – Resp. for gathr’g, analyz’g & manipult’g complex, high-vol, highdimensionality data from varying srces to enhance pric’g algorithms. Reqs: Mastr’s or frgn equiv in Inf. Mgmt., Math. or Sci. + 1yr exp in a data sci. occ.

Must have 1yr exp w/: working w/ data extract’n + clean’g, expl. analysis, pred model’g, + montor’g

deployed alg. Will accept Bach +3yrs exp in lieu of Mastr’s + 1 yr exp. Send CV to cnutter@optoro.com ref DSCI. MARKET RESEARCH ANALYST: RESEARCH MARKET CONDITIONS FOR SALES�BRANDING OPPORTUNITIES. RESUMES TO ERNEST MAIER INC, ���� ANNAPOLIS ROAD, BLADENSBURG MD �����.

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LONG DISTANCE MOVING: Call today for a FREE QUOTE from America’s Most Trusted Interstate Movers. Let us take the stress out of moving!

Speak to a Relocation Specialist, call 855-947-2919

COMPUTER & IT TRAINING PROGRAM! Train ONLINE to get the skills to become a Computer & Help Desk Professional now! Grants and Scholarships available for certain programs for quali�ied applicants. Call CTI for details! 1-855-554-4616 BATH & SHOWER UPDATES in as little as ONE DAY! Affordable prices - No payments for 18 months!

Lifetime warranty & professional installs. Senior & Military Discounts available. Call: 1-877-649-5043 CABLE PRICE INCREASE AGAIN? Switch To DIRECTV & Save + get a $100 visa gift card! Get More Channels For Less Money.

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BECOME A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! We edit, print and distribute your work internationally. We do the work… You reap the Rewards! Call for a FREE Author’s Submission Kit: 844-511-1836.

Music PANDEMIC BLUES? Learn to play blues guitar and bass from brian Gross, award winning guitar instructor/blues guitarist/ band leader of BG and the Mojo Hands. Free lesson �irst month. Bgmojo.com 301-332-4242

I WOULD LIKE CITY PAPER MEMBERS and readers to contact me if they are interested in guitar lessons. I will teach songs at the rate of $7.50 per hour from my home in Alexandria, Virginia. If students aren't quarantined, I will visit their home if they live in the vicinity of Alexandria. For information as to what songs I will teach, please visit my web site www.nightlightproductions.club. You can also subscribe to my Night Light Promotions YouTube channel, look for all my current music videos, and rocking songs by West Of Eden and Thrivo And The Areas. For all other information please call (703) 751-3786, and ask for Kelly West.

Buy Sell Trade HUGE CHURCH RUMMAGE SALE on Saturday, August 28 from 8 am to 2 pm at 4701 Whitehaven Parkway NW, Washington DC 20007 in the gymnasium.

Clothing for all ages, jewelry, housewares, huge selection of books, toys, games and sports equipment. Masks and social distancing will be required. Please check stpatrickschurchdc.org for last minute details.

DONATE YOUR CAR TO KIDS. Your donation helps fund the search for missing children. Accepting Trucks, Motorcycles & RV’s , too! Fast Free Pickup – Running or Not 24 Hour Response - Maximum Tax Donation – Call 877-266-0681 CASH FOR CARS! We buy all cars! Junk, high-end, totaled – it doesn’t matter! Get free towing and same day cash! NEWER MODELS too! Call 866535-9689

What’s your #City Paper Story?

Community LOOKING FOR INDIVIDUALS TO DISCUSS FRITZ LANG and other classic black and white �ilms and TV series.

Contact Stevenstvn9@ aol.com LOOKING FOR INDIVIDUALS to discuss American foreign policy. Contact Stevenstvn9@aol.com.

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Visit washington citypaper.com/ wcp40 or use the #CityPaperStory hashtag on social media to submit your story!

ISCHYRA SOMA FITNESS Comes to Mazza Galleria, Sept. 2021! Fitness for YOU!!

Readers Choice Voting starts August 19.

Go to washingtoncitypaper.com/bestof-dc-2021/ to vote for your favorites! washingtoncitypaper.com August 20, 2021 39

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