It might not change a thing, but Glover Park residents are at least getting to vent their emotions as they protest, in various ways, that the landlord for Max’s Best Ice Cream did not renew the lease and instead gave it to Max’s next-door neighbor, Rocklands Barbecue. The latest development comes at the hands of fifth graders, who staged a peaceable protest outside Max’s on Thursday afternoon.
The group of 15, who marched to the store with posters, are students from Benjamin Stoddert Elementary School. “Stoddert Peacebuilders is a group of students at the school who care about making the world a better place by planting ‘seeds of peace’ whenever and wherever possible,” says Steve Dingledine of the Georgetown Patch.
Photograph by Lauren Joseph.
A crew from Adobe DPS films our digital development manager, David VanVoorhees, at work in the Washingtonian offices.
All photographs courtesy of The Bar Method.
After only one Bar Method class in Chicago in 2009, Kate Arnold was hooked. “I immediately fell in love with it. I was amazed at the changes I saw in my body, my posture, my alignment, and my endurance,” she says. Based on fat-burning interval training and principles of dance conditioning, the body-sculpting workout incorporates barre, floor, and light weight exercises combined with muscle isolation techniques.
In 2010 Arnold and her husband returned to the District, and she was surprised to find there were no Bar Method studios in the area. The career attorney decided on a big life change—she left her law job and opened the first Washington-area outpost of Bar Method. “I couldn’t imagine my life without a [Bar Method] studio. I contacted Bar Method headquarters and began to inquire about opening one,” she says.
Three years later, the Bar Method has expanded to Chinatown and Bethesda and has earned some loyal followers—so loyal that the instructors know most of their fitness enthusiasts by name. But the DC franchise doesn’t stop there. It will now offer brides-to-be and bridesmaids a get-in-shape wedding package. We caught up with Arnold, who told us about the new wedding workout and her tips on looking your best in time for the big day.
One of the cartoon versions of the Met Gala recap. Image courtesy of Lucky.
A roundup of this week’s style news would be totally remiss if it didn’t include this little chunk of fashion-y gold: 3.1 Phillip Lim for Target! Mark your calendars now: The limited-edition collection is scheduled to debut September 15 with more than 100 pieces. Target’s behind-the-scenes blog has the details, plus a sneak-peek video to get you all excited. [A Bullseye View]
The latest edition of online mag To & From—cofounded by DC’s own Meg Biram—is practically overflowing with chic goodies, all at the ready for your pending gifting needs, from Mother’s Day (get to it, procrastinators) and graduations to weddings and baby showers. Just consider this your warning: You will probably find a cute thing or five for yourself, too. [To & From Magazine]
It’s tough competition against Jennifer Lawrence’s photo-bombing perfection, but our pick for Best Met Gala Recap came in form of these hilarious little cartoon versions of eight of the night’s famous attendees. Our personal fave: Miley. [Lucky]
Big news out of Georgetown: The much-anticipated store from CFDA award-winning designer Billy Reid unlocks its doors in the former Pizzeria Uno space on M Street Friday—making Washington host to the retailer’s tenth location. We’re pretty jazzed about this stylish addition to our city’s shopping roster, and you should be, too. Check our post from February about the store’s move to Washington, then go scope it out in person. And stay tuned for the details on a rumored opening party—featuring the designer himself—to follow.
Billy Reid. 3211 M St., NW.
Harrison is moving into the big leagues, in terms of both info and pattern-mixing. Photograph by Nicole Wilder for ABC.
Well. With just one episode left in season two, we finally find out who the mole is—and I can honestly say I did not see that coming. Then again, that’s because the mole turned out to be a character I thought was killed off in season one, so maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention. To the recap!
After FLOTUS’s announcement last week that El Prez had been stamping his presidential seal on another woman’s envelope, Cyrus is desperately trying to do damage control. He holds a press conference in which all he says, over and over, that the state of El Prez’s marriage is a “private matter.” He’s filled El Prez and Olivia in on the situation, and once they actually get out of bed, she’s in fixer mode, but El Prez tells her to stand down. “I made a decision, and I will deal with it,” he says. He wants to handle everything on his own, and she seems charmed by his forcefulness, and they’re both as giddy as adolescents. It’s kind of cute.
Mellie, meanwhile, is interviewing a fixer of her own, a creepy guy who looks like a less attractive Tom Cruise. He asks her for total honesty, but she tells him she’s going to do whatever is in her best interest—which includes keeping the name of El Prez’s mistress to herself for the time being.
Cyrus goes nuclear on Ira Glass Lite for doing the interview with FLOTUS, and James is all, How many scoops of the century do you want me to give up? “This was my big break,” he says, and Cyrus laughs in his face and calls him naive. He brutally says that FLOTUS got IGL that job to hurt both him and El Prez, and James is too stupid to understand that. He leaves IGL alone, eyes full of tears. Divorce him, IGL!
Olivia gets back to HQ, where the Dream Team are still trying to figure out who the mole is. Olivia first goes to her safe to make sure the memory card from the Cytron voting machine is still inside, and Abby finally admits to Jerk Jeremy that she stole it, to which he’s like, Duh. They think the mole is VP Sally for, like, one minute, but then hacked into her computer and saw someone logged on looking at Albatross files while she was doing a televised press conference, so they know it’s not her. JJ, who announces he’s part of the team now, keeps making cracks about how the President “banged someone,” and everyone else has awkward face. Harrison tries to convince Olivia she needs to let him take care of her. “You’re not the fixer here—you’re the problem,” he says. Instead, Olivia, who’s weirdly calm and happy, just tells him to focus on the mole investigation.
Next up on the list of things giving Cyrus a hernia: El Prez’s announcement that he is not going to seek another term (which at this point seems like a pretty good idea). Cyrus appeals to him, and when that doesn’t work he tries Olivia. He meets her in their favorite park and tells her if VP Sally (who pops up briefly to misquote the bible and verbally spar with Cyrus) gets her claws into the Republican party their rights will be impinged upon. “If I really thought this is what he wanted, I would fight to the death to give it to him,” he says. But Il Papa is unmoved. As she leaves, Ballard’s creepy boss comes up. Turns out Ballard’s whole mission was to get between El Prez and Olivia, and now his boss wants Cyrus to show El Prez the tape of Olivia and Ballard having kitchen sex. He also wants Cyrus to have no further contact with Charlie, whom he says used be one of his guys.
Easy, healthy recipes like local dietitian Katie Heddleston's oatmeal berry muffin will impress even Mom this Mother's Day. Photograph by Heddleston.
There are plenty of places to take your mom for brunch this Mother’s Day. But if she’d rather spend some quality time at home with the family, make sure she doesn’t lift a finger this Sunday by whipping up these healthy, super-simple brunch recipes.
Looks like the Redskins will remain the Redskins as long as Dan Snyder has his way. He told USA Today Friday morning that he would “never” change the name of his NFL team.
“It’s that simple. NEVER—you can use caps,” Snyder told the publication.
The development comes amid continued criticism that the moniker is a racial slur against Native Americans. Just last week, at-large DC Council member David Grosso, an Independent, introduced a non-binding resolution calling on Snyder to drop the team’s name, which Grosso described as “historically racist and derogatory.”
Grosso suggested that Snyder change the team’s name to the Washington Redtails, a reference to the famous World War II-era African-American pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
In the USA Today story, Snyder offered a firm response to critics of the team’s name:
“We will never change the name of the team. . . . As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it’s all about and what it means, so we feel pretty fortunate to be just working on next season.”
A curtain by Alexander Schervashidze after Pablo Picasso from “The Blue Train.” Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
There are a wealth of contradictions underpinning the National Gallery’s extravagant new show, “Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced With Music.” The show explores the incomparable legacy of Serge Diaghilev, a pioneer of the avant-garde and a man who shaped the way ballet would evolve throughout the 20th century but who also freely described himself as one “with a complete absence of talent.” This is a show focused on Diaghilev, but there is very little of him in it, given that he didn’t dance or sketch costumes or choreograph ballets or compose music. A sense of him emerges only fleetingly, as a mustache-twirling impresario curating art in a thoroughly fascinating way.
Another contradiction: Despite the nomenclature, the Ballets Russes never performed in Russia. Before 1909, when the troupe was formed, Diaghilev (who was independently wealthy) had worked as an art critic and curator and had produced concerts and operas in St. Petersburg and in Paris, where the first Ballets Russes production was staged. His choreographer was Michel Fokine; his principal dancers included Vasily Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova. For the next 20 years, the company traveled around the world, presenting more than half of its productions in Britain and collaborating with talents as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel. It is impossible to imagine modern dance being the same without it.
“Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes” is a reimagining of an exhibition that ran at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2010, and while the Washington exhibition has more of a visual art bent to it than the British show, it’s still an unexpectedly broad undertaking for the National Gallery. The institution literally raised its roof in order to display two key items: a backdrop painted by Natalia Goncharova for a 1926 production of The Firebird, and a curtain designed by Picasso in 1924 for The Blue Train, both of which are more than 30 feet tall. Although the two items are imposing, visually, they feel curiously flat taken out of context. Like cubism, the show deconstructs ballet down to its composite parts and presents them as individual masterpieces, when by their very nature they were designed to play as part of an ensemble.
The same goes for the costumes, which seem to make up the majority of items on display. Most are extraordinary, both in their construction and their heritage, but to see them displayed on mannequins is only a small part of the story. The exhibition includes video footage of modern reconstructions of Ballets Russes performances featuring companies such as the Joffrey Ballet and the New York City Ballet, but the two-dimensional projections don’t quite evoke the sense of ferocious energy and sweat that live dance does. The heaviness and intensity of the early Ballets Russes costumes in particular provoke a hundred practical questions about their nature in performance that remain unanswered. As works of art, the costumes pale in comparison to their elegantly rendered designs, including the gorgeous drawings and watercolors by Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst.
We have an unspoken style rule when it comes to must-have fashion: Spotting it once is a chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times, and we start accelerating the style to the top of our want list. So when we spotted five of Washington’s fashion bloggers sporting the same sleek, snake-embossed clutch from GiGi, we took a mental shopping note.
These leather bags are perfectly sized to fit all your daily essentials, come in a dozen shades from muted to bright, and can be personalized with a monogram. Take a look at how each of these District darlings paired her envelope clutch, then snag your own bag at Georgetown’s Sassanova or online.
