Cherry blossom tourists and kite-flyers had a chance to get star-struck over a total nobody last weekend. Some guy you don’t know organized an “Improv Everywhere” event in which another guy you don’t know acted like a celebrity, and some 40 other people acted like paparazzi, bodyguards, photographers, and adoring fans; and in the end, all the randoms on the National Mall were following him around and taking pictures with their cell phone cameras. His fake girlfriend even got fake-mad when a fake-fan demanded that he sign her (real) boob.

The supposed singer of the supposed hit song “Trapped in My Heart” attracted dozens of hangers-on and fans-for-a day but failed at his ultimate mission of being allowed to go to the top of the Washington Monument without a ticket. Apparently the security guard nearly came to blows with the tour guide in the Abraham Lincoln costume over it. (You can always count on Honest Abe to reassure us that we’re all still created equal, and we all need a ticket to get to the top of the Monument.)

Together with the Freeze Action that happened in Union Station a couple weeks ago, this is almost enough to convince you that Washington is becoming absurdist-artsy-hip like we always dream it will.

Photo by Bruce Witzenburg.

This is important. Classy. I like the way it looks. Five times distilled, dual carbon filtered. From Holland. Where the bulbs come from. And that kid with his finger in the dike…Hans Brinker, right? More like Hans Drinker! Good provenance—is that the right word? provenance? yeah?—Jacques de Lat, third-generation master distiller. That’s MASTER distiller. An important distinction. And the bottle. Mwah! Gold—speaks to the brand and the superiority of the product. People are gonna want this. Good work, everybody.

(Empty bottle of Trump Vodka on the Champlain Street NW side of the Church of Christ, Scientist on Euclid Street NW)

Frozen Tropics has the best pics from the H Street invasion of Bobby Flay’s sweater vest and distressed jeans. Mr. Charred Poblano was in town Wednesday to tape an episode of Throwdown, his show on Food Network, where he “surprises” real chefs who think they might be getting their own show, only to have to stand there in front of the cameras and feed Flay’s ego. Sweater Vest took on Granville Moore’s exec chef Teddy Folkman and his moules and frites. The taping actually took place at the Argonaut, complete with Flay taking a call when he was supposed to be bringing it (Endless Simmer has the evidence). ES also dropped a few nods to the home team that sound suspiciously like a spoiler alert:

Though audience members have been asked not to reveal the outcome of the throwdown, I can say that I found Teddy Folkman’s blue cheese and bacon mussels to be plump, juicy and flavorful, and his frites were crisp, salty and coated in a delicious blend of herbs like tarragon and thyme. The yellow tomato and truffle aioli that he provided for dipping was amazing, though Folkman admitted that the expensive ingredients would preclude him adding it to the menu anytime soon. Bobby Flay’s mussels, true to form, were served in a broth that featured coconut milk, green chiles and tons of butter. They were tasty, but seemed smaller and less tender than Folkman’s. And although Flay’s roasted poblano (naturally) dipping sauce was delicious, the fries themselves were disappointingly plain – more like fast-food fries than Belgian frites.

DC Foodies say the show is set to air in May or June.

My boyfriend, Mike, spent Wednesday working as an extra on the set of the film State of Play, with Ben Affleck and Russell Crowe. He says it felt like detention.

“I thought it was cool at first that I was cast as a ‘delivery guy,’ as opposed to being just another passerby, but in the end, I was just a douchebag wearing a UPS uniform.”

He had to get to Ben’s Chili Bowl, where the scene was being shot, at 7:15 a.m., which for us is the middle of the night. He was shipped in a mini-bus “people mover” to the “staging area” on New York and G, where he got uniformed up in his UPS browns. The only other extra wearing a costume was a Screen Actors’ Guild member who had come all the way from Jersey for his shot at stardom.

Then they waited five hours for something to happen, snacking on Goldfish crackers.

When their big moment finally came, they got to walk down the sidewalk – pushing an empty dolly – across the street from Ben’s. Three times. The Jersey UPS guy had negotiated a better route for them to walk, so they would be more clearly seen on camera. He vaguely insisted on being the one on in front.

The SAG members sat in the same tent, in the same cattle call, but they were getting paid twice as much and got first dibs on the good food for lunch. They sat around bragging about the other movies they had barely appeared in.

Mike didn’t get to see Ben Affleck or Helen Mirren but he did get a few glimpses of Russell Crowe, who he said looked (in his role as an investigative reporter for the fictional Washington Globe) like a slightly healthier Christopher Hitchens.

From what he can gather, the scene involves Russell Crowe going in to Ben’s Chili Bowl, ordering a chili cheese dog, and then something happens involving a woman they’d made up to look more or less like she was dying of herpes, and Crowe almost gets hit by a car, and in the meantime his briefcase disappears.

So when State of Play comes out and you go see it at the Gallery Place Regalplex, and that scene comes on, look for the UPS guy you can’t really see. That’s my boyfriend, the movie star.–Tanya Snyder

Hey, remember William Morva? The Dude-Ball-playing, barefoot, raw-meat-eating coffeeshop regular of Blacksburg? It took a jury under four hours to give him the death penalty. Can’t get enough? Check out Roanoke Times‘ online package “Homicide on the Huckleberry,” if purely for the title alone. —Jule Banville

Kudos to the New York Times for digging into Spitzer prostitute Ashley Alexandra Dupré’s MySpace page and coming up with this gem:

On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

But the Times missed the real draw of Dupré’s site: the user comments. What do you say when your online acquaintance is revealed as a prostitute? Whatever it is, it’s probably in all caps. The highlights:

Read the rest of this entry »

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax is dead at 69, according to the CEO of Troll Lord Games. The developer of the new edition of D&D says he hasn’t “grokked” Gygax’s demise yet.

Pete Wentz: Statesman. Lover. Genius. But not Fall Out Boy’s lead singer.

The New York Times reports that Henry Waxman’s congressional committee may ask the Justice Department to fire up a criminal inquiryinto Roger Clemens. For those without a TV, radio, or Internet connection, Clemens on Feb. 13 took the hot seat in front of Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in what turned into a hilarious circus of distortions, politicking, bullshit, and very possibly lies.

It’s that last part that Waxman’s interested in. Clemens used the hearing to do what he’s been doing ever since the Mitchell report on MLB steroid use came out last year–that is, deny he’s ever taken the substances. His denials contradict the testimony of his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who says he shot up the Rocket on numerous occasions.

Much won’t come of this. I hope the Justice Department has better things to do than investigate whether this blowhard once used drugs. Waxman has said he regrets holding the hearing, which perhaps indicates how interested he is in really pursuing this matter. Plus, Clemens has suffered plenty: It was revealed that an abscess on his butt once caused him to bleed through a pair of designer pants.

Of the 60 or so musical numbers from Enchanted performed on last night’s show, Kristin Chenoweth singing “That’s How You Know” was notable, not for its rote-ness (it is a rule, for instance, that anytime you see guys in hardhats in a production number, they’re gonna carry the singer around at the end) but for the tenacity shown by the conga player flanking Chenowith throughout the performance.

It’s as if he was sticking up for all conga players, forever forced by their ungainly instruments to the rear of the stage, back by the windchimes. I am a conga player of substance who has been given the opportunity to perform on national television, he seemed to be saying, And I will not step out of the frame now that you can no longer hear my instrument! You made all ambulatory conga players proud last night, sir. Drum circles around the world will thwack a paradiddle in your honor next weekend!

A four-alarm fire that started this morning in the historic Boone Hotel in downtown Boonsboro has spread to other buildings in the town square and is still smoldering. The hotel, built in the 1700s, was being renovated by romance novelist Nora Roberts and her husband, Bruce Wilder, who owns the bookshop across the street. They’ve lived in Washington County for some 30 years, according to the Haegerstown Herald-Mail.

An archived story in that paper describes the couple’s plans to renovate the six-room hotel for use as an inn, with each room to reflect a different literary theme and couple—including one reserved for Roberts’ In Death series (written under the pseudonym J.D. Robb) which features Eve Dallas, sexy police lieutenant of the future, and “her Irish billionaire, Roarke.”

The hotel went up in flames shortly before 8 a.m. and spread to at least four buildings, including apartments and a Subway sandwich shop. Nearly 40 fire companies were called in; various news reports this a.m. say no one was hurt. WUSA9 is reporting that witnesses source the fire to a kerosene heater that tipped over and started an explosion.

Roberts and Wilder also bought the U.S. Hotel in the same town square and their son, Dan Aufdem-Brinke, had planned to open a reastaurant there. Interestingly, he had a different restaurant on South Main Street, next door to the Boone Hotel, that was destroyed by fire roughly a year ago, on Jan. 19.

D.C.-born cartoonist Charles Burns–his family quickly moved to Seattle, but hey, a native’s a native–is having his brilliant horror-inspired graphic novel, Black Hole, made into a film by David Fincher. (The book, originally serialized in its own comic, recently came out in paperback.) Fincher’s a fine choice for the film–Burns’ obsession with blood-and-guts and social dysfunction is a nice match for the guy who made Zodiac and Fight Club. But having finally gotten around to Eastern Promises (note to self: my wife doesn’t like films in which a knives get shoved into somebody’s eyeballs), I think New York magazine’s blog makes a good point:

In related news, what the hell happened to David Cronenberg? Old Dave should have been all over this one, what with the queasy body experimentation and disfiguring pox, but he’s off making masterfully taut crime thrillers.

Kudos to the Washington Times, home to strong-willed Eagles fans, for flooding the zone on the Pope’s visit to D.C. in April–for about a month now the paper’s had a dedicated blog on the subject. Today it brings word that parishioners at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in New York City, where Benedict XVI will lead a prayer service, are getting the shaft as far as actually getting to attend. Worse, only 27 tickets are being made available to St. Joseph’s parishioners to attend the pope’s mass at Yankee Stadium.

Closer to home, the blog also brings word of the crucifix that will hang behind the Pope when he delivers mass at Nationals Park on April 17. The winner, pictured above, currently resides at St. Mark the Evangelist Church in Hyattsville.

I couldn’t help but notice the photo in the Post of the photographer at City Paper. It’s meta Darrow! Can you spot him??

Also noticeable: It’s harder than a rubber dildo to cover the Sex Workers Art Show and still abide by the vanilla rules of a mainstream newspaper. To wit:

“At the same time, it is very much about, well . . . that word.” (Translation: fucking)

“One performer, dancing to ‘God Bless the U.S.A.,’ pulls a chain of dollar bills from a place money should never be saved.” (Translation: her asshole)

Stay-tuned for the full-on, noneuphemized version from CP’s Show & Tell columnist, Amanda Hess, who has done her post-show homework about the artistes.

There has been a fascinating and ugly debate taking place in the City Desk comments section lately between Lance Armstrong’s defenders and his detractors.

It started in a thread about the steroid circus now going on in the halls of Congress, when Betsy Andreu, wife of one of Lance’s former cycling partners, alleged that Armstrong has tried to ruin her life for saying that she heard him admit to doctors that he had used performance enhancing drugs.

Andreu’s comments brought a strong rebuttal from Tim Herman, a lawyer for Armstrong in a 2004 fraud case surrounding Andreu’s allegations about Armstrong’s drug use. (Both Andreu and Herman confirmed in interviews that the posts on the City Paper board are indeed theirs.)

Herman’s rebuttal has since been dissected and rerebutted piece by piece by Andreu and a horde of mostly anonymous anti-Lance posters. Somebody posting as MSM inserted a link into the thread for a really, really fascinating and really, really ugly Mp3 of a phone conversation between America’s first golden-boy cyclist, Greg LeMond, and Stephanie McIlvain, who testified in that case that she didn’t hear Armstrong admit to using performance enhancers.

In the conversation, which was taped surreptitiously — McIlvain at one point asks if it’s being recorded, and LeMond assures her it’s not — McIlvain confesses that she was in fact in the room with Andreu when Armstrong admitted using the drugs.

The fear and contempt LeMond and McIlvain have for Armstrong and his lobby makes the conversation gripping, despite the low-fi quality of the recording. LeMond alleges that Armstrong is out to ruin him, and says that before “I have 17 years of my life destroyed by Lance, I will go down fighting!”

There’s likely nothing new contained in the allegations posted here. All the events alleged to have taken place in the thread took place a long time ago, if at all — the confession of drug use that Andreu says she heard from Armstrong was in the mid-1990s. The LeMond/McIlvain tape has been making the rounds in the cycling underbelly since at least last fall.

But, the passion in this thread makes it clear that the suspicions about Armstrong’s cleanliness as an athlete aren’t going to go away soon. And with what’s taking place across town right now — with federal lawmakers ready and eager to go back in time to investigate cheating and drug use charges in baseball and football —
by the end of the LeMond/McIlvain conversation, listeners are left with one big question:

Hey, Congress: When’s Lance Armstrong Coming?