Word: anacostia
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...remarkable thing about Community Carol is not, however, what it says but who is performing it. The cast of 30 includes equal numbers of professional actors and members of Washington's impoverished Anacostia neighborhood, an area pioneered by slaves working farms they had bought in secret, and so long benighted that some areas lacked electricity in the 1930s. The amateurs are not stereotypical victims or lowlifes: while some come from straitened circumstances, one is a Berkeley-educated attorney, others are students at a selective high school for the performing arts, and one is a former seminarian who does managerial tasks...
...noble aims and aggressive attitudinizing are both in evidence in Community Carol. Says Rauch, who directed and co-wrote: "We started years ago in places where the barriers were geographic. In cities some communities can be just as isolated because of other factors. We could tell Anacostia was responding because 270 people, by far a record for us, showed up for auditions. Urban work seems to be our future...
...President, you promised us a clean administration--clean planet, clean schools, clean government. After 100 days, what do we have? An oil slick in Alaska, blood-stained streets in Anacostia and mud-spattered reputations in the government, your government...
This is the Washington tourists see - 13 million visitors a year, 3.5 million in April alone, when the Tidal Basin wears a garland of cherry blossoms. Tourists do not generally see the black ghetto areas like Anacostia, where trimmed lawns and trees as stately as dowagers mix strangely with dour housing projects and graffiti-ridden seesaws. Nor are there many tours that stop at the corner of 14th and Belmont, where stained couches lie cut open on the sidewalk. Washington is 70% black. Not all is poor black; the "Gold Coast'1 out along 16th Street is largely black...
...case of one ambitious project, made a contribution-a tie clasp. The trinket will go into a 25-ton, 10½-ft.-tall "Children's Freedom Bell" that the Jaycees of Pfafftown, N.C. (pop. 600), plan to cast and erect on an island in the Anacostia River, near Washington...