Sioban Farey, she of the incensed, wordy postings regarding the planned closing of the National Cathedral’s greenhouse, is deep in the weeds on this issue now. Since City Desk broke the news the greenhouse would close June 29, Farey and between 65 and 300 other incensed plant-lovers (her estimates) have been busy organizing to stop the insanity.

They’ve launched a rudimentary Web site, savethegreenhouse.org (upgrades are coming), and Farey has been on the horn with the Washington Post (a weekend story is promised) and NBC 4 (news tonight at 6 or 11, she thinks). It was on the front page of the Northwest Current (can’t link to it, sorry) and, well, they are doing this thing; they are going to keep that greenhouse open.

The Cathedral, which has already handed out virtual pink slips to the greenhouse employees, does not appear to be budging. The associate dean, Margaret Bergan Davis, has said (I’m paraphrasing) that cuts need to be made, new visions have to be realized, the greenhouse is not part of said new visions, so good luck, Sioban Farey. Davis left a message on Farey’s machine about all the other green programs going on that still are a part of the Cathedral’s vision. Farey was not impressed.

Farey has said, well, Farey has said a lot. In a 45-minute conversation late this morning, she brought up Darfur, 9/11, the snipers, the Walter Reed scandal, global warming (natch), and the stress our nation’s decision makers are under. (Plants reduce stress. There are studies. She could find them.) For all of these reasons and many more—including people like to buy plants and herbs at the greenhouse—Farey thinks this is a cause worth fighting for.

“I read the strategic report yesterday. They [the Cathedral officials] want more diverse, younger participants. We’re moving into a more enlightened green period. Even if it’s John McCain, it’s going to be more progressive environmentally. America is rejoining the international community….I’ve been working on planet change the last couple of years out of my own personal interest…This is the nation’s church in the nation’s capital and what they’re doing is cutting the tiny greenhouse loved by lots and lots of people….”

Farey of Chevy Chase, D.C. side, says she has also been enlisting “establishment” people, one of whom calls what’s happening “absolutely disgusting” and another of whom promised to pull $1,000 out of her pocket right then and there “and she said she has a friend who’d be willing to contribute considerably more.”

Yet this is not just a greenhouse for the matrons of Cleveland and Glover Parks, she attests. Latinos shop there for the specialized herbs and people “make pilgrimages” there on a regular basis.

In other words, watch out Margaret Bergan Davis. You’re going to have to deal with this one for awhile yet.

(photo by Just Chaos)

By now, thanks to Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher, you may have already mustered a certain amount of righteous outrage at the antics of stickler advisory neighborhood commissioner Frank Winstead. Barbara Meade and Carla Cohen, the owners of the venerable Politics and Prose bookstore, however, seem to have just gathered theirs. This came out in their weekly newsletter last night:

Every once in a while we get an abrupt reminder that we live in a jurisdiction where small business is not respected or encouraged. When we first opened across the street, there was no government agency that could advise us on what we needed to do. Then, after we made the applications we needed to, we could not get an occupancy permit, no matter how many times we called or went down to the office responsible for that. The process simply stopped somewhere in the Office of Regulatory and Consumer Affairs. We were fined and we started over again, but the certificate was never issued at our first location.

A few years ago we were infuriated when, as a D.C. business, we had to pay a surtax for the new stadium. The rationale: the stadium would help businesses in the District of Columbia. We fail to see how the baseball stadium helps Politics and Prose, but perhaps we are just missing something.

The latest irrationality occurred when an inspector visited us last week and told us we had to remove the bench in front of our store or pay for a permit. The bench, which is used by our employees eating lunch, or by people accompanied by strollers or dogs, or occasionally by the homeless, seems harmless. But the inspector told us it had to be gone the next day or….

Apparently this latest problem is occasioned by a member of the Advisory Neighborhood Council who went to war to get rid of all the outside chairs and tables on our block. As many of you know, the sidewalk is very wide in front of our buildings so there is no problem walking there even with sidewalk fixtures. And we think lots of activity on the sidewalk—sitting, eating, and playing—make our block more lively and fun. But Mr. Frank Winstead doesn’t, and he has made it his personal mission to eliminate everything. You can write to Mr. Frank Winstead and express your opinion of his mission: fwwinstead@hotmail.com.

Following a full day of surgery—Earth Day, natch—a couple of D.C. cosmetic surgeons started crunching the numbers. Just how much carbon is used in the disposal of sucked-out fat?

Considering that an average of 7 pounds of fat is sucked out per surgery and that national surveys estimate Americans undergo 450,000 liposuctions and tummy tucks annually, that’s about 3 million pounds of yellow, goopy fat to get rid of. Each pound of fat is about 78 percent carbon, but because no one has yet figured out how to make biodiesel out of it in a way that people will, uh, stomach, the fat gets incinerated, pushing about 1,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Drs. Navin Singh and Marwan Khalifeh, senior partners at Ivy Plastic Surgery Associates in Chevy Chase, D.C., figured out that creates the pollution equivalent of driving 2 million miles.

So they’re trying to do something about it. Their office is paperless; they’re energy conscious and all of that. But there’s only so much they can do with fat, so to offset handing about 160 pounds of fat per month over to a medical waste disposal service, Singh and Khalifeh are purchasing carbon credits.

Singh calls it a “baby step” for his industry. “The first incentive is to conserve, reuse, recycle. We do as many of those things as possible, but when we can’t, you have to go for a lazier way and purchase credits.”

The surgeons got online at carbonfund.org and signed up to spend about $100 to $200 a month on carbon credits, which will (they hope) go to companies and nonprofits involved in pollution reduction, protecting existing forests, planting trees, etc. “You do wonder if this is legitimate or if someone is taking our money and not doing anything, so we spread it around with different companies while we figure this out,” says Singh.

Something else they figured out: If people actually jogged off the weight, that would be cheaper and better for their health, but not actually better for the environment. “They would just liberate that carbon into the air by burning it off,” says Singh.

(photo by keizie)

Novelists are generally cautioned not to directly engage with the critics who give them a bad review—it only encourages bad blood down the line, the thinking goes. Tova Reich, the Chevy Chase author of My Holocaust, has taken this advice: She’s indirectly engaged with a critic.

Responding to David Margolick’s takedown of her book in the New York Times Book Review, she wrote a letter to the editor assuming the voice of one of My Holocaust’s characters, Lipman Krakowski. The gist: Margolick didn’t get the satire. “For this I came to America?” Reich’s imaginary amanuensis writes. “To hear some little Jewish ayatollah boxer deliver a little Jewish fatwa against a writer, telling her what she can and cannot write because of how it looks to the goyim?”

Reich writes from Chevy Chase, while Krakowski writes from Wheaton. (Lesson: If you’re going to call in imaginary people for backup, make sure he’s on the same Metro line. Me, I have a seven-foot-tall, muscle-bound wingman named Spiro who lives in Rosslyn.) But Reich has some actual people taking her side. The Book Review’s letters section includes a defense from a Washingtonian, Judith Plotz, and Shmuel Herzfeld, rabbi of Ohev Sholom—The National Synagogue in Shepherd Park. Even though Reich’s salvo is considered bad form, it did bump My Holocaust higher up my nightstand pile. As Walter Kirn wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 2001, “Either books are worth fighting over or they’re not—and if they’re not, why read them in the first place?”

The future of the Avalon Theater, D.C.’s only nonchain cinema, got a little more secure earlier this month. The Avalon Theater Project, the nonprofit group that rescued the Chevy Chase moviehouse in 2002 and reopened it in 2003, has bought its building from local developer Douglas Jemal for $3.5 million.

Jemal had only recently purchased the 1923 building, which he had leased with an option to buy from John Kyle, who owned the theater when Cineplex Odeon abandoned it in 2001. Bill Oberdorfer, executive director of the Avalon Theater Project, says he doesn’t know when Jemal bought the structure, which also holds a Ben & Jerry’s outlet. But the maverick real-estate magnate, who put an estimated $300,000 to $400,000 into theater renovations, was still leasing from Kyle when the Avalon reopened three years ago.

There are two advantages to owning, Oberdorfer explains. “Basically, the mortgage is less than the rent,” he says. “The other element…is that we filed for an exception from property taxes, which you can do in the District as a nonprofit owner, but not as a nonprofit lessor.”

Although ownership doesn’t directly give the nonprofit more flexibility to operate, Oberdorfer says it does “just in the sense that it’s less expensive for us. What it allows us to do is free up more funds for programming and the like. More staff to do more things than we were doing before.”

The Avalon shows independent, foreign, and offbeat Hollywood films on its two screens and also hosts special events and regular repertory series, including “indieWIRE Undiscovered Gems” and “Asian Cinevisions.” Oberdorfer says the project’s organizers are considering additional ventures, including some sort of film education program for children. “But that’s very much in the idea stage,” Oberdorfer notes. “We have do a feasibility thing on it to figure out basically what the community would like to have.” After all, the Avalon is now a neighborhood theater in every sense of the term.

On Saturday, April 22, the D.C. Public Library (DCPL) closed four of its branches—the Capitol View, Chevy Chase, Francis A. Gregory, and Woodridge Neighborhood Libraries—for volunteers to participate in a “Fix It Up” day. “What we were trying to do was to go above and beyond what [custodial staff are] physically capable of accomplishing…such as painting and planting and things of that nature,” says DCPL spokesperson Monica Lewis.

But some of those who slogged through the rain that day were instead tasked with general housekeeping that appears to overlap with the duties of janitorial staff. From 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., about a dozen volunteers at each location were asked to wash windows, clean tables, scrape off tape, throw out old furniture, and pick up litter.

“I’m constantly amazed at how little maintenance has been done over the years,” says Richard Huffine, president of the Federation of Friends of the D.C. Public Library, who oversaw the Chevy Chase cleanup. “The sad thing is what [the volunteers are]…doing is what the library should be doing on a regular basis anyway.

The turnout might have been better had the spring cleaning not coincided with Earth Day—or with a 1 p.m. town-hall meeting at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Lewis says that the meeting didn’t affect turnout, and that the volunteers’ efforts were appreciated. “They take care of a lot, the facilities people,” Lewis says. “They have to keep branches clean, maintain the mechanics of branches, and that’s a full time job, there, in itself.”

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we run down what’s going on in local Internet discussion groups.

Brookland
Sarah on 17th and Jackson Streets NE in Brookland expresses shock that a motion-detecting light failed to scare a plant thief from her porch. “3 hanging baskets of flowers were stolen off my front porch despite the motion sensored light. My neighbors saw a man enter my front yard at about 11:30 pm. They scared him away, but he came back later.” A plant pilferer also struck Joel and Hun’s porch, despite, or perhaps because of, Hun’s premonitory dream the night before that the couple would be robbed. The herb collector made off with six strawberry plants, an aloe plant, some mint, a jade plant, and two plants left unidentified.

ChevyChaseCommunityListserv
A Legation Street NW resident reports an intruder who was “about 22 years old, dark hair, clean shaven, possibly Hispanic, wearing a red shirt.” So, the board ponders, is it racist to refer to someone as “possibly Hispanic”? “Unless someone heard the intruder speaking Spanish, it’s an assumption that is not useful in finding the person and it contributes to an impression of bias in a largely white non Hispanic neighborhood,” writes one poster. “I doubt that this is true of the genuinely welcoming spirit I’ve found in our neighborhood.” Another poster didn’t think the post was racist, but suggested “possibly Latin American” would have been a better choice. A leader of the anti-labeling faction wasn’t buying it. “If using ‘possibly Hispanic’ as a description is helpful, why do we not use ‘possibly Irish’ or ‘possibly Jewish’ to identify White suspects?’”

Brightwood_DC
Kelley and Karen, a husband-and-wife team in Brightwood, found a small, white dog on the morning of April 23, “with a blackish collar studded with fake diamonds,” wrote Kelley. His wife says that the presumption that the diamonds were of the faux variety “was just kind of a hunch. It was basically your tacky dog-bling.” Prince, as she later learned the dog was called, had no nametag, yet the diamond description was enough for the New York Avenue animal shelter. The owner called within 20-25 minutes, says Karen, and picked him up.