Serenading Louie - Gunston Arts Center

Busy day today. Lunch at Tagolio pizzeria in Crystal City. This is a coal fired pizza place that ranks right up there with all the other good Neopolitan pizza we have found in DC. The coal oven gives a slightly smokier flavor to the crust. Their menu was far more interesting than Paradiso's with some eclectic mixes of fresh vegetables and meats.

From there we headed over to the Gunston Art's Center, a playhouse inside the auditorium of a local school complex. Serenading Louie is a lesser known work of Lanford Wilson, who to be honest is a lesser known playwright to me. But then that is part of my goal in seeing all of this theatre, to make the lesser known (to me), known. This play had a great first act, with a purposefully drab home of the 70s and wonderful actors. I say first act because there was a power outage during the intermission and they had to cancel the second act. So I read the rest on wikipedia. Real twist ending.

Dave Matthews - Nationals Park

We have and are planning on seeing a lot of live music this summer. Dave is always a safe bet for a good show, as I like pretty much everything and he tends to improvise a bit. I saw him once before at Jazz Fest in New Orleans. This one was at Nationals Park which was my first visit there. Beautiful stadium. The biggest downer for the night was the absolutely atrocious heat. Had to be in the high Nineties even after dark. We ended up staying for a bunch of his popular hits. Highlight for me was when he brought out the lead singer from the opening act, Zac Brown, and sang with him. Anyway, we left early to beat the traffic. I was doing calculations in my head about how many trains of 8 cars each it would take to empty a stadium that was holding about 40000 people.

Pandora's Seed

Politics and Prose had author Spencer Wells talk about his new book. Wells is a population geneticist and he discusses how we can explain major anthropological trends by looking at the historical markers in our DNA. From this, scientists have pieced together when humans first adopted agriculture, about 12ooo years ago, and that this adoption while making us expand quickly as a species, also made us less healthy than our hunter gatherer forebears. He can also see that at one point during the second ice age of about 10000 years ago, our population dipped to only about 2000 members and we were near extinction. This species stress caused us to begin a long trend of innovation, enabling us to survive and thrive.

The point of his book is to first show how much in common we all have, and to hope that the human species begins to draw from its common background to tackle the tough global, species level problems we have today such as resource constraint, overpopulation, and global warming.

An American Playlist Evening of Classical Works and Popular Song @ The Kennedy Center

This is the last night of the three night free concert series put on by the Kennedy Center in an effort to promote teaching the arts in school. Harolyn Blackwell sang opera, Branford Marsalis played Sax, we heard a youth chorus, and Smokey Robinson and John Mayer performed a couple of songs each. I was definitely impressed by Mayer who gives a great live performance, and is extremely charismatic and funny on stage. The National Symphony Orchestra played behind all the performers by a couple of different conductors.

Screen On The Green - The Goodbye Girl

This was a well conceived idea, poorly executed. I mean, I am sure the thousands of people who have been attending this event for the past seven summers had a great time, but our particular night turned out poorly executed. First the good part. We got their early, laid out our yoga mat in a good spot and read while waiting for dark. A brief ninja storm poured buckets on us and was gone in a moment. When when the opening credits for the feature presentation came on, about half the audience leaped up in their place and started waving their hands in the air in time with the music. It all seemed very coordinated and I have no idea what the motivation was but it was pretty funny. The movie started and we bore down to the story which rapidly became a bit confusing (to those of us who had never seen it). About half way through, an announcement came out that this particular film roll was out of sequence. It then proceeded to repeat about 30 minutes of film which we had seen earlier in the wrong order. While it started to make a bit more sense when the section came on the second time as to where it belonged in the movie, we were not ready to sit through 30 minutes of deja vu, so we headed home.

An American Playlist Evening of Lyrics and Verse @ The Kennedy Center

So this was the show we got the free tix too last week. We thought the Roots were headlining it, but it actually was was probably even better. The lead singer from the Roots was the host, along with his drummer. It was basically a showcase of young poets from across the country and the world reading their verse. Moving, funny, powerful. Mambo Sauce, a local DC Hip Hop band played sets between, and had some of the band members young kids break dancing in between. Awesome show.

Waffle Brunch @ Et Voila

Continuing on the Belgian National day celebration going on this week, we headed up to what I suppose are the Palisades in northwest DC to check out brunch at Et Voila. All three participating Belgian restaurants had a brunch going on but we figured we had just seen Belga, and would probably make our way to Brasserie Beck for a beer dinner some day soon, so that left an opportunity to see this slightly out of the way spot.

Breakfast was just OK. The waffle part was just a dessert, not the main dish. I had a stuffed savory crepe with spinach and salmon that was pretty good. Sam had an omelette that was more of a frittata, wih fries. Fries were good... The waffle dessert was excellent: we got ours with half fruit and half belgian dark chocolate sauce. Wow. Very dark. Yummy.

Jack Johnson @ Mt Airy

We drove out to this concert, about an hour outside DC, halfway to Baltimore, on Saturday afternoon with a cooler full of beer and a blanket with two friends. This is basically a partly covered amphitheatre in the woods, similar to Wolf Trap, but not really as elegant. We got there just as the first act was scheduled to come on, but opted to tailgate in the parking lot for an hour. When we got in, there was not much in the way of seating so we sat in the pavillion for the concession stand, which I thought was fine. The concert itself was kinda boring. Jack Johnson, is the music you listen too on the beach while drinking and doing other things. It is relaxing background music. Seeing it live does not really add to the experience in my opinion. Sam got up close one of their more popular songs and said it was better that way, but then, this one was not really for me to begin with.

Mussels Throwdown @ Belga Cafe

Apparently it is Belgian National Day this week and it is being celebrated all over DC with a series of events each day. I was alerted to this by the Young and Hungry blog's beer events calendar. Saturday's was a competition between the three chefs from Belga, Et Voila, and Brasserie Beck held in the alley behind Belga, over in Capital Hill. All three came up with very eclectic mussel combinations that were professionally judged. Hard to pick a winner as they were all truly amazing. We chowed down on multiple free samples from each along with Belga fries and a couple of Hoegardens.

One Man Lord of the Rings @ Woolly Mammoth

I got myself on the ushering list for Woolly Mammoth now too, which is probably my favorite company so far in DC, and this was my first assignment. Again, the ushering was a piece of cake so no worries there. The show itself was very funny. It is hard not to be impressed with the stamina of the lead. He basically paraphrases all three movies in about an hour and change, interjecting some original comedy, including saying outloud what many of us were thinking while reading/watching the movies. This show is really not for the unitiated though, as even I found myself lost at moments, not quite realizing where he was in the timeline. He sat down afterward and told us the history of how both this show, and his one man Star Wars, came to be.

Florida Days @ Capital Fringe Apothecary

This was a show written by one of Sam's residents. It is the kind of show that can give us all hope that we too can write theatre that will be put on during a Fringe Festival. We got to meet the actors afterwards and they all seemed pretty cool. The female lead was actually pretty excellent and I hope she see's some opportunities come out of this experience.

Lypsinka Legends @ Studio

I finally got around to getting Sam and I an opportunity to Usher. The show was for Lypsinka Legends, where the leads are dueling divas in drag. The ushering part was pretty easy, and I think a great way to see a lot of theatre on the cheap. The show was just so so. Had it's moments of hilarity, but there was not enough to pull it all together. Kinda felt like a modern movie comedy where all the funny lines are in the preview and the movie itself ends up being boring.

Mama Mia @ Wolf Trap

We had purchased lawn tickets to see Mama Mia a couple of months ago at Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center. This is my fourth time seeing this show, and Sam's third, so our relatively distant perspective of the action did not really bother us. What an awesome venue. If you are on the lawn, they let you bring in your own food and drinks, including alcohol. We realized though that we need to invest in lawn chairs. I am pretty certain some of the actors were the same from the last Orlando performance we saw. I thought it was all well delivered. The fun part about this performance was how much more the crowd was, with much of the audience getting up to dance when they sang Dancing Queen and other popular songs. Great time.

Free Tix @ The Kennedy Center

Went to Kennedy center at 7am to wait in line for free Tickets to a John Mayer concert there on the 20th that were being given away at 9am. There were about 500 people in line when I got there and a lot more showed up later, but I got the tickets. When I was done at about 9:30, I got in the line for a show on the 18th featuring The Roots and a night of verse which were being given away at 10am. This line was much shorter and I got excellent seats. More in a minute.

Embassy of Croatia party

It would probably be a bit much to call this a Gala, but it was put on in the same fashion as the Embassy of Ethiopia party we went to, organized by thingstododc. We got the tix from Goldstar a couple of weeks before at close to half price so this was a pretty affordable night out. The embassy is right around the corner from us on Massachusetts near S St NW, in one of those beauiful old mansions like so many of he lavish embassies in the area.

The lack of AC in this old building was the only real drawback to a good evening. The ambassado herself spoke at length about the country and answered everyone's questions extensively. The wine was good with a white bordeaux and a montepulciano being poured. The food though was amazing. I had no preconceived notions of Croation fare so this was all a pleasant surprise. There was a great baked lamb and eggplant dish, a baked rice, fish and tomato casserole, cold roasted peppers with feta and olives, cold shrimp and squid salad, a spinach quiche, and some wafer like deserts.

Fireworks on the Mall

Sam got us rooftop access to the Newseum where we enjoyed a great picnic dinner on china but we opted to head into the scrum to see the fireworks since this is our first year in town. We got out on 6th st and started walking west. When we got to the 15th, there were some police barriers we had to cross but luckily many before us had conveniently moved some aside. We got as far as just before the monument before the first burst. So we quickly laid out our blanket and enjoyed the show. I feel like a fireworks snob after the excellent (and close up) displays Orlando has put on the past few years but this one was pretty good, decent length. Not really any original moments other that a heart and the finale which was just an explosion of sound and color. Though I suppose that pretty much describes all such things.

After it was over, we remained to let the crowds dissipate for a while, then walked over to the White House and gave Brenda an improptu paraphrasing of our ghost tour of the area. Definately not as well delivered as the original. We took the metro from McPherson Square the one stop back to Dupont Circle. Went to Dolcezza's for a gelatto the the Darlington House Cantina for a Guinness and calling it a night.

Canoing on the Potomac

We discovered Jack's boat house a couple of weeks ago while researching things to do on the fourth. There are a handful of boathouses in Georgetown, providing canoes and kayaks. A couple of them also support the crew organizations and hobbyists of the area. These are mostly pretty staid affairs. Jack's, near the end of the K street under the Whitehurst freeway, long after the last sign indicating no other outlet, is not in that category. It is a vibrant, relaxed hideaway, filled with summer charm. The decor is festive, shaded, and comfortable. Grills and picnic tables are provided for customer picnicking. No hassles. First come first serve - stay as long as you like. Share with others.

We did just that. Packed a picnic and showed up at about 1pm. Parking was scarce, but the owner had just left so they let us use his personal spot. Even though it was the fourth and there was a good size crowd milling about, there were plenty of boats available. We got an available table, warmed up the grill, and cooked some hamburgers we had gotten at whole foods. We forgot the red cups, but luckily the adjacent table had a sleeve and welcomed us to some. Signs are posted to discourage alcohol but as long as you are discreet they do not seem to be overzealous about it.

We took an hour tour, about 30 minutes down to the Kennedy Center then back again. We made pretty good time, and an hour was just enough time to get some sun and not be too tired the next day. Plus there was a heat wave coming at us that had just arrived across the DC metro area.

The Brickskeller

This bar has apparently been a DC Beer destination for over 50 years. I have seen it on my beer calendar since moving in but had not managed to make it over until Saturday night. Our friend Brenda was in town, and she was meeting up with someone she had not seen since highschool who coincidentally was visiting DC with his family the same weekend. So after briefly rendezvousing at Lauriol Plaza for dinner and margaritas, we headed here for a few beers. Their beer menu runs into the hundreds with representatives from just about every beer producing nation. Not every beer is in stock, as we stumbled across a couple that were not, but considering the ones that were are impressive. I had a St Bernardus Tripel from Belgium followed by a Great Lakes IPA. Sam tried a Lime Shandy (Half Beer half soda with lime), a nice refreshing drink allowing you to endure a long day of drinking.

Phillips After 5

Our first week in our new diggs so we crossed the street to see the Philips Gallery for the first time since moving to DC. During the summer they do a networking event on the first thursday of every month called Philips After 5 where the museum is open late, food and a cash bar are provided, and various forms of live entertainment are on display along with the artwork. Rather than pay admission for two at an event we hope to be able to attend regularly, we opted instead for the annual membership.

We missed out on a dramatic reading of Yasmina Reza, but caught a local craft distillery tasting of their absinthe and Gin, the barbeque by Geppetto catering (which was excellent) and the jazz by Potomac Jazz Project. We only caught the end of the evening (about an hour) so briefly walked through some of the rooms to see the artwork on display. What a great eclectic collection complete with Van Gogh, Degas, and Picasso. In fact it is somewhat fascinating to be drinking a cocktail and eating dinner with a great master hanging a few feet away.

We look forward to attending regularly. In August, we have heard it moves to every thursday.