Yesterday, in my quest to meet new people and feel more at home in this new city, I decided to attend a meetup at the Gallery Place cinema. Our group watched the new Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly movie Step Brothers (which, if I were a movie critic, I’d describe as “a rip-roaring good time,” but I’m not, so I’ll just say it was hil.ari.ous and the duo’s best work yet).

On our way out after the movie (at about 6:45 p.m.), the lobby area was packed, and we soon realized the exits were blocked by uniformed officers and the walkway out to the road (by Clive’s) was deserted, though I could see police officers across the street walking around. The officer I spoke with said he had no idea what was going on and pointed me to another exit in a different direction.

A guy on the street told me that Coldplay was headlining at the Verizon Center (in the same complex as the cinema), but I overheard a security guard telling people there was a bomb threat and someone else said there was a “mysterious package” somewhere.

Seventh Street Northwest was closed for at least an hour, though I can’t seem to find any report of what happened. Are these types of things just a usual occurrence here? Does anyone know what happened? This is the second time in a week and a half that I’ve been somewhere in the city and an area was closed off due to a “suspicious bag” or a “mysterious package.”

I’ve visited Chop’t three times since it opened last month. I’m still working on composing the perfect bowl. There’s a lot to choose from at this Chinatown salad bar spot–which isn’t necessarily a good thing, as our food critic Tim Carman pointed out last week. I’ll let his comment do the writing work for me: “The draw of places like Chop’t is supposed to be its DIY approach, but frankly, I hate standing there at the counter, trying to compose a salad on the spot while feeling the impatient eye of both employee and awaiting customer burning a hole in the base of my skull. Besides, unlike at home where you can fix any mistake by adding or subtracting ingredients, you’re stuck with your salad, for better or for worse, once you’ve made an order.” Still, despite the stress-ridden process, each visit has been better than the last. But, even if I never attain the superior salad, I have discovered another draw to keep me coming back to Chop’t. I’m almost shameful to admit it: but, for me, the desserts have been the most reliably yummy part of the experience. Past that long bar of healthy radishes, edamame, grilled asparagus, albacore tuna, grilled portabello, etc., there are some damn good sweets. My second trip, I tried the brownie. My third trip, I tried the blondie. Both were very satisfying. And they’re the ideal size: small, maybe two by two inches, a solid five to seven bites. The perfect thing to turn you around after your ambitious collection of “Thai curry rocket fuel” dressing, spinach, Italian salami, celery, and anchovies proved a flop.

Yo! Free animatronic robot dinosaur!

At 1 p.m. today, a 7-foot tall, 14-foot long animatronic robot dinosaur baby will be hanging out at the corner of 7th and G Streets NW. No word on how long the T-Rex plans to stay.

The Robo-Rex is, of course, a stunt—a promotion for the upcoming “Walking with Dinosaurs—The Live Experience.” The stunt is free; the “Experience” will run you $30.50 to $82.50.

In it, according to a press release, “Fifteen life sized dinosaurs will roam the arena floor using state-of-the-art animatronic technology as they tell the story of how dinosaurs roamed the earth 65 million years ago.”

Clearly, animatronics are rad. Dinosaurs are incontestably rad. Animatronic dinosaurs, undoubtedly, will be doubly rad. But 65 million years ago? Please!

“Dinosaurs Live” runs Wednesday, September 19th, through Saturday, September 22nd, at the Verizon Center.

Last night, I attended a screening of Superbad at Regal Gallery Place. The film featured Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and one of the most powerful movie-theater-talkers I have ever encountered.

Sure, Gallery Place is notoriously loud. But strangely enough, at this particular showing, the audience was fairly quiet, save for this one man. He was tremendous: a massive, booming presence. He sat alone. And he was seated directly behind me.

The man’s commentary track began almost immediately, precipitated, strangely enough, by the first sign of cleavage. “Mmm-MMM!” the man announced. “Aww, yeah, baby!”

This man was there, it seemed, for one purpose: He was there to speak for us. At a time when—owing to the oppressive imposed silence of the movie-theater environment—we had no voice, this man stepped forward to provide the entire audience’s verbal response to the film. “Mmm!” the man said, over and over and over again. Depending upon the situation, the man also provided a resounding “Aww, no!”

After a good two hours of constant exposure to this man’s verbal remarks, I was able to pinpoint their nature. The man’s comments, I determined, served two functions. They existed (a) to encourage boobs; and (b) to discourage potential homosexual behavior. (”Oh, no!,” the commentator announced, as the two boys in the film moved to hug each other. “Oh, no! Oh, don’t do it, man!”) I began to think that I had this man figured out. It got to the point that, when a pair of breasts appeared on screen, I began to think it—”Mmm-HMM!”—before the moans even boomed out from behind me.

As the film neared its end, however, I was forced to amend my binary theory. As one of the boys began to engage in foreplay with a girl—a girl whose breasts, of course, had already earned a sharp “MMM!”—the man stepped away from his standard homophobic/boob commentary to offer a remark of a different nature.

“Oh, no, man, come on,” our commentator yelled. “Oh, come on! Don’t come in your shorts, now!”

Our commentator, it seems, also provides (c) sage advice.

Our Feed column from two weeks ago offered opinions (most of which putatively came from our crack cadre of Restaurant Raters) on ten local restaurants. The restaurants ranged from Air, located at the top of the Washington Monument and offering “dishes based on gaseous chemicals” to Cryptids of Rock Creek, an eatery inside Rock
Creek Park that serves up Nessie burgers.

Left Overs, which was described as a “hotspot” for “nonprofit employees, activists, [and] Al Gore wannabes” and a “concept restaurant [that] takes ingredients that other area restaurants are ready to throw away and creates just-like-new meals” prompted one reader to ask, via email, “Was that a joke?”

Yes, it was: The column ran in the issue dated Friday, March 30 under the title “Open on Sunday.” The following Sunday was April 1.

“I can’t find the adress [sic],” the reader’s email continued, “and the phone number is also not working. Can you help me?”

For most of the ten restaurants, we used non-existent addresses—Left Overs, for example, is located at 3.1459 Pennsylvania Ave. SE—and each restaurant’s phone number had a 555 exchange.

That reader wasn’t the only one to be confused. A blurb on the hockey-themed eatery Hamboni, with its “row of ‘rickety old wooden folding chairs’ along the counter and a long bench fronted by plexiglass” prompted an anonymous reader to call our offices. Though Hamboni’s address was listed as 638 7 ¾ St. NW, it was also described (by a fictitious Restaurant Rater) as being situated “just across the street from the [Verizon] Center”—where the caller told our Young & Hungry columnist he works.

Another reader, 59-year-old Chinatown resident Karen Carroll, says she “thought the Foam Factory” (whose menu supposdely included “small [tapas] plates of air” and a martini described by a rater as a “giant glass of bubbles”) “was something new inside the Fuddruckers, like they had opened up a bar, and they were specializing in, like, smoothies….” Again, some confusion is understandable: Though the nonexistent eatery was given a fake address—736 7¾ St. NW—it was also said to be “adjacent to Fuddruckers.” There is, in fact, a Fuddruckers in Chinatown, and you can find it at 734 7th St. NW.

Carroll’s curiousity led her to seek out the non-existent street and restaurants, enlisting the aid of those red-clad downtown guides and even a police officer. Earlier this week, she even stopped in at Fuddruckers.

“They thought I was crazy,” she recalls.

“I have the greatest sense of humor in the world. You can tell I’m…easygoing,” she says. “I think this is screwed up,” she continues, with a laugh. Carroll, who used to work as a concierge at major hotels in the area, says she “would have been embarrassed” to steer hotel guests towards the likes of the Foam Factory.

What did you think—a good laugh? Kinda annoying? Both? Neither?

Back in February we told you about someone up in MoCo who had the bad habit of tossing City Papers in the trash before readers could get to them. Turns out there’s another one out there, this time in the city.

Our business manager, David Knauss, recounts what happened last Thursday, around 3p.m. at Gallery Place:

A young reader approached one of our boxes to pick up a paper. An older woman, chunky, in her fifties, long straight gray hair, stopped her and then grabbed all the papers from the box and chucked them into a nearby trash can. She took the paper in the window, tore it up, and then tossed it back into the box. The reader tried to stop the woman, told her it was wrong, that it was theft and that she had no right to throw away the papers. A “Start a Revolution” volunteer saw the whole thing and backed up our reader. Those red-jacketed security people who hang around Gallery Place (some kind of security for the BID?) watched but would not get involved. They told our reader that they had heard about people throwing away newspapers, but that they couldn’t do anything about.

When our reader tried to take one of the trashed papers, the crazy woman pulled it from her hands and told her she “didn’t need it.” Apparently, the woman was put off by the short skirt on the back cover, said we always have something bad on the back. Anyway, the reader said the woman struck her as a religious type. She had two blue bags with church insignias on them….The woman was wearing a green polar fleece jacket and blue jeans. After crossing the street to empty another of our boxes, she headed north on 7th street and disappeared.

Anyone else see this person?

Photographer Ivan Pierre Aguirre sent City Desk a pair of interesting shots he grabbed at 10th and K Streets NW a couple of weeks back. Ivan, a student photojournalist, came across a hidey-hole of sorts that seems to be a favorite place for local folks to indulge in a rock or two.

Share your pix of favorite neighborhood drug hangouts with us!

Regal Gallery Place is a fantastic movie theater—easy parking, plenty of food options in the building, and, sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can buy a child’s admission ticket from one of the machines in the lobby, and the ticket taker won’t notice that you only paid a $5 in admission. Or so I’ve been told.

I recently went to my new favorite movie theater for a late afternoon showing of my new favorite movie, Dreamgirls. I saw a 4:10 show listed in the paper, but it wasn’t up on the big board when I went to buy my ticket. The nice person behind the glass told me that the 4:10 showing wasn’t being advertised because it was an OC/DA show—that’s “Open Caption/Descriptive Audio.” In other words, the movie gets captions for the hearing-impaired and a device that plays narrated descriptions of what’s happening on screen is available, too, for the visually-impaired.

The ticket seller told me that most people who don’t have trouble seeing or hearing don’t want to buy tix for an OC/DA show. I told her I was curious—and didn’t want to wait around for the next Dreamgirls show scheduled for 6-something—so I’d go ahead and check it out.

The verdict: It was good to have the captions. There was a lot of dialogue I would’ve missed if I couldn’t have read what was going on. And I only had to tell the annoying kids sitting behind me to shut their damn mouths a couple of times, since I could read along with the movie even when they were chattering away.

Unfortunately, only a few movies are OC/DA at the Regal Gallery Place. (Currently Because I Said So and Norbit, but they keep an ever-changing list.) I assume that part of the reason that Regal doesn’t advertise the OC/DA films is because they don’t want folks who aren’t seeing-/hearing-impaired selling out these shows so that there are no tix left for the people who need them. So don’t take 20 of your friends to the OC/DA show and take up all of the damn seats.

But, if you’re ever at Regal, and it’s completely dead, and the only showing of the movie you want to see is an OC/DA show, check it out.

On Friday, Aug. 21, some budget-minded travelers looking forward to cheap weekend bus trips to New York City got some bad news. Patrons of Vamoose Bus, one of several bus services operating between D.C. and Gotham, received the following e-mail: “Due to an injunction against us by Washington Deluxe Bus company, we are suspending operations as of Aug. 22.”

The injunction, which prohibits Vamoose from operating in the District, was the result of several months of legal wrangling between the two companies. The conflict stemmed from the fact that a current Vamoose employee had once been employed by Washington Deluxe; the employee, according to Andrew Citron, the attorney representing Washington Deluxe, is prohibited from working for a competitor.

Vamoose has been operating since February 2004, and owner Sam Bluzenstein says that Deluxe just wants to put him out of business. “They’re trying to avoid having competition,” said Bluzenstein, who has hired a new attorney to fight the ruling.

Bluzenstein offered refunds to customers who had their trips canceled, and on Aug. 28, Vamoose reinstated service, picking up and dropping off in Bethesda and Arlington instead of its former Chinatown and Tenleytown locations. Bluzenstein estimates that the change of locations has cut about half of his company’s ridership.

Marisa Marchitelli, a former District resident who moved to New York three years ago and uses buses to go back-and-forth several times a year, was one of the more than 1,000 people who had made round-trip reservations with Vamoose and was forced to find another way home.

But that’s par for the Chinatown-bus course, Marchitelli says, lumping the injunction in with long lines, crowded, dirty buses, and delays. “The services are unreliable,” she says, “so I often make reservations on more than one carrier.”

—Julia Dahl

Regulars at the YWCA Gallery Place Fitness and Aquatics Center may soon be pulled out of the water. Due to a budget shortfall, the YWCA is threatening to close the pool for good.

“The pool costs $200,000 per year…the board can’t make ends meet,” says Orysia Stanchak, executive director of the National Capital Area YWCA. Stanchak says hard numbers are difficult to come by—some YWCA members pay for pool use as part of their standard membership—but she estimates that about 175 people purchase “pool-only” packages at $50 a month. “We cannot afford to keep the pool open at those rates,” she says.

Some Y members have banded together for a mission ripped from a bad ’80s comedy: raise $200,000 by Sept. 8, or there may be no more laps. “It’s like a reality show,” says Tamara Alfson, co-chair of the fundraising committee formed by members committed to saving the pool. And as they look under their couches for briefcases full of cash, Alfson and others have questions about financial management—and why the YWCA couldn’t predict and address the facility’s financial problems before notifying members of the pool’s impending closure in late July.

Stanchak says the task force need not have $200,000 in hand on Sept. 8—the pool could reopen if a workable long-term plan is presented to the board later next month. “If someone said, ‘We’re going to sell cookies,’ everyone knows that’s not doable,” Stanchak says. “If someone says, ‘These energy savings save $30,000,’ we can take a step forward.”

Still, Alfson—who uses the pool as part of her physical-therapy regimen for a debilitating joint condition—is not optimistic about the task force’s chances. “We’re not going to have $200,000 by Sept. 8 unless someone flies in and drops money on us,” she says.

On July 9, panda cub Tai Shan celebrated his first birthday with a party befitting the child emperor of the National Zoo. Over in Chinatown, it was just another Sunday for Washington’s other Tai Shan, the restaurant at 622 H St. NW. Manager Nancy Wu, who didn’t even know it was the panda cub’s birthday, says the 12-year-old restaurant enjoyed a slight uptick in traffic when he was first born, only to return to the “same as before.” Not that Wu expected any benefits to sharing a moniker with the animal formerly known as Butterstick. The panda’s name is Mandarin for “peaceful mountain,” but Wu’s Tai is Cantonese, sharing the same root as “Taiwan” and referring to her hometown in Guangzhou. Those distinctions, of course, are lost on the occasional fanny-pack-wearing lao wai. “They say, ‘Oh! Your restaurant have same name as panda,’” she says, chuckling. “Well, maybe my restaurant is lucky, or maybe my restaurant’s food is good.”