Summer sightseeing in Washington

Washington, D.C., has been one of my favorite cities ever since my first visit, on a high school trip with Project Close Up.

Last weekend was my first time back in about six years. I saw some dear friends, attended a bar mitzvah and on Sunday, I had a chance to do some sightseeing.

My first stop was the Newseum, which I'd seen years ago in its old location, in Virginia.

The new six-story building on Pennsylvania Avenue is impressive and there's a great view from the rooftop terrace. Even from a distance and through the summer haze, the sight of the U.S. Capitol never fails to thrill me.

I liked the displays that focused on the history of newsgathering, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, press freedom and challenges to the First Amendment.

You get a good overview of how covering the news has changed over the centuries, including the advent of online journalism, blogging and Twitter.

The headline flubs on the walls in the bathroom, taken from the Columbia Journalism Review, were funny - as long as you weren't the one who wrote them.

But I have to admit, the journalism theme park aspects of the museum left me feeling a bit cold.

I decided not to "shake rattle and roll through I-Witness! a 4-D film experience." I did walk through the "G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI's First Century" exhibit and some of it was a little lurid - the Unabomber's cabin and the electric chair that killed the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby.

Also, I was a little put off by the video of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. They're not journalists, they're comedians. Still, I realize it's 2010. You have to be fun and interactive while you're trying to inform and enlighten. And they do offer their own unique spin on the news.

The Newseum is worth a visit - use your AAA card for a discount on the admission. And it got me thinking - aren't we overdue for a Broadway revival of The Front Page?

My next stop, after a long, hot walk across the Mall, was the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History - hands down my favorite museum in the world.

I've always been a huge American history buff and I love the way the museum tells the story of the United States - not simply through the action of great men and women but through the lives of ordinary Americans and through popular culture.

There are examples of great courage - the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where four black students sat down in February 1960 and refused to leave until they were served. And there are items from our collective cultural memory - Kermit the Frog from The Muppet Show and Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.

While I've been to the museum numerous times, I have never felt as moved as I did on this visit, when I saw Michelle Obama's inaugural gown.

At the bar mitzvah on Saturday, the rabbi reminded us that it was the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington and he urged us to recall Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech.

Admiring the gown a day later, in a crowd with many African-American museumgoers including elderly men and women, families with young children, was incredibly poignant.

It was a tangible example of how far we've come in realizing Dr. King's dream and in fulfilling the promise of this country - the promise of equality.

Here is the first lady presenting the gown to the Smithsonian in March:



Since it was on the way to the Metro, I stopped at the National Portrait Gallery before heading back to my hotel.

There's an interesting exhibit through Jan. 2 of Norman Rockwell paintings and drawings from the collection of directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. I learned how Rockwell had influenced their work as filmmakers, which I hadn't realized.

I love the Portrait Gallery, with its collection of paintings and photographs of famous Americans from all walks of life. But after seven hours of walking around, I was getting a little tired. (In my mind, you haven't done enough sightseeing until you're ready to collapse.)

Hopefully I can return on my next visit - which won't take six years - and I can include a little theatergoing, too.

Obamas do dinner and a Broadway show

Now isn't this sweet:

“I am taking my wife to New York City,” the president said in the statement, “because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished.”

President and Mrs. Obama are in New York City tonight, where they dined at a restaurant called Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, then traveled to Times Square to take in the 8 p.m. performance of Joe Turner's Come and Gone at Broadway's Belasco Theatre.

How cool is it that of all things, Michelle Obama wanted her husband to promise to take her to a Broadway show after the campaign?! Pretty darn cool, if you ask me.

Of course, there are some naysayers:

"While the Obamas’ visit to New York was considered private, there was some very public criticism of the trip. The Republican National Committee suggested that that the outing was inappropriate and that Mr. Obama was out of touch, especially given the looming bankruptcy of General Motors.

The committee issued a press release on Saturday afternoon that read, “Putting on a show: Obamas wing it into the city for an evening out, while another iconic American company prepares for bankruptcy.”

Oh puh-leeze!

I think the president and first lady are doing more for the economy by traveling to New York City for dinner and a show than they would hunkering down in the White House. They're supporting tourism and the arts, both of which employ a lot of people. And they're drawing attention to the work of August Wilson - a great American playwright.

Besides, what is he supposed to do tonight to prevent General Motors from declaring bankruptcy - require that every American go to their nearest GM dealer Monday morning and buy a new car?

I know we're in a recession but I don't expect the president to walk around in a hair shirt. Isn't his example better than Vice President Joe Biden telling us all to be very afraid?

I'm just sorry that I have lousy timing. I'll be at Joe Turner next Saturday night - missing the first couple by exactly one week. Still, it'll be my first August Wilson play and I'm pretty excited about it - even without the president in the house.

Fashion and other statements

Okay, it's morning in America and as a nation, we still have all of the challenges we had yesterday. But before the glow of yesterday's history-making inauguration wears off, permit me to make a couple more observations:

There's a great story in The New York Times about the interracial, interethnic and interfaith families of Barack and Michelle Robinson Obama. It's quite a mix! This line made me smile:

"Now the Obama-Robinson family’s move to the White House seems like a symbolic end point for the once-firm idea that people of different backgrounds should not date, marry or bear children."

And in a break from all the attention being focused on First Lady Michelle Obama's gown, President Obama, wearing "a white bow tie with a single-vent, notch-collar tuxedo and an American flag pinned to its lapel," looked mighty fine, too.

Politics and theatre

At Media Nation, my friend Dan posted his thoughts on last night's speeches at the Democratic National Convention by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Michelle Obama. Some of the comments mentioned the whole scripted, stage-managed aspect of Obama's speech.

Well duh! Of course the political conventions are manufactured drama. People act like that's a big revelation. In a way, politics is theatre. Speechwriters, like songwriters and playwrights, make an appeal to people's emotions. The words they use, the images they construct, are all designed to conjure a specific picture in the minds of the audience.

Sure, it would be nice if people made their choices after spending hours watching C-SPAN and poring over position papers, but they don't. At least I don't. I mean, I know something about where a candidate stands on the issues, certainly. I read newspapers and magazines and catch snippets of speeches on television.

But honestly, I think it's less of a reasoned decision and more of a gut reaction. Whether or not you feel favorable toward a candidate, especially at the national level and especially when voting for president, depends on how the person hits you in the gut. It's a matter of which candidate you connect with.

I realize that there are more concrete aspects, too, like which candidate has a better plan for the economy or bringing the troops home from Iraq. Still, you can't really know how that candidate will act in every situation. But you can have a sense of which person shares your values, which candidate will do a better job protecting the things that are important to you.

And really, is it so different in the theatre? Isn't that part of what hits us with a play or musical that we love, because something about a performance or a subject resonates?

Democrats, Denver and history

I'm on the couch, in front of the tv, my feet up on the coffee table, watching CNN, ready for the Democratic National Convention, live from Denver. It's going to be an exciting four days of political theatre.

Whatever your views, this is truly a historic week in American history. Consider that in 1961, the year Barack Obama was born, black Americans living across a large swath of the southern United States were not permitted to vote. Now, a major political party is preparing to nominate an African-American candidate for president. It's something that no one could ever have contemplated when Obama was born.

Sometimes it's easy to throw up your hands and feel that one person can't make a difference. But in the 1960s, ordinary Americans, surmounting fear and acting with tremendous courage - black and white, college students and housewives - put aside their own personal safety to secure civil rights for black Americans. In the process, some of them were jailed, beaten and even killed. They were not afraid and they helped make this country better - for all Americans.

It was the sight of peaceful marchers being attacked by the police while walking from from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In a bit of incredible coincidence, ABC was showing Judgment at Nuremberg, a film about Nazi racism, that night in March 1965, and broke into the movie to broadcast the bloody images that horrified a nation.

A week after the violence, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and urged passage of the Voting Rights Act. (The picture is of Johnson signing the act into law, on Aug. 6, 1965.) It's a remarkable speech and a great example of using the office of the presidency as a bully pulpit. You can listen to the speech here.

In his speech, Johnson made the struggle for equal rights for black Americans a struggle for all Americans, invoking the words of the civil-rights anthem by saying, "We shall overcome." In the decades since the act was passed, the number of black elected officials has climbed from 300 to more than 9,100. Including, of course, the junior senator from Illinois.

If you want to read a compelling novel about the struggle, I recommend Freshwater Road, by Denise Nicholas. The protagonist is a young African-American woman from Michigan who ventures south during Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of young, mostly white and Northern, volunteers to Mississippi in 1964 to try and register black voters.

Okay, enjoy the convention. I'm looking forward to Michelle Obama's speech tonight and an appearance by Sen. Edward Kennedy, who's undergoing treatment for a brain tumor. Obviously, that will be an incredibly emotional moment.

Update 9:38 p.m. Teddy just finished speaking. It was a poignant moment and he sounds like he's got plenty of fight left. His comment that "this November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans" really got to me and I'm a little teary right now. Plus, he's absolutely right about health care for all Americans - it's a right, not a privilege. Here's a transcript of his speech.

Update 10:58 p.m. I thought Michelle Obama's speech was pretty good. It softened her, showed where she came from and served as a good introduction to her husband. She was passionate without sounding strident. She's not a forceful, stand-and-deliver type of speaker, her voice reaching a crescendo as she gets to an applause point. The fact that she seemed a bit nervous, that she didn't quite know what to do with her hands at times, was kind of endearing.

I think the part that will resonate with a lot of voters was at the end, when Barack Obama appeared by video hookup from Kansas City. Watching him interact with his wife and two young daughters was terrific. They seem like a close, loving family, people you'd want to have for your friends or neighbors. In a country where too many white people don't have friends or coworkers who are African-American, that may be the most important thing her speech accomplished. There'll be plenty of time for policy talk later. You can read her remarks here.