HUMOR: A DC Fairytale
Drew recalls a 2018 trip to the Kennedy Center.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
Donald Trump’s decision to close the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has received much criticism including from musicians like Ben Folds who I saw perform 30 years ago. Folds had recently been at the Kennedy Center for a number of years as the Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra until he resigned in protest after Trump took over the center’s operations in early 2025.
I find my tenuous connection to Folds and the Kennedy Center to be quite helpful in supporting Trump’s decision to shutter the Kennedy Center because of its increasingly dangerous state of disrepair. When I first saw Folds he was performing with his trio, The Ben Folds Five, and they were the opening act for the band Black 47 at the original 9:30 Club in DC. (Many people do not know that the 9:30 Club was an early inspiration for the Sphere in Las Vegas. The architects simply added better lighting, did not place a pole in the middle of the room, and removed the persistent odor of sweat, stale beer, and just a hint of urine.)
I was quite impressed with Ben Folds Five when I saw them that first time, so in between acts I went to the basement with my cousin Shawn to buy their EP (on cassette). While Shawn and I were standing at the counter, Shawn saw what he later described as a rat the size of an armadillo walk, without any need for speed, across the t-shirts they had arrayed on the back table. Shawn, showing the extreme restraint that allows him to teach psychology to college students, asked the employee if they named the rats. The employee did not even look up and said: “Only the really big ones.” Apparently the armadillo-sized rat was not worthy of a moniker.
I only bring this up because President Trump said the Kennedy Center was “rat-infested” which made me think of the 9:30 Club, Ben Folds, my cousin Shawn, and a hint of urine. Trump said pieces of the Kennedy Center ceiling are falling without warning and pose a hazard to the unsuspecting rat population wandering the theaters and lobbies of the Kennedy Center. Many people who visited and worked at the Kennedy Center, including Folds, said Trump’s description of the Center was simply not true. I beg to differ.
In 2018, my then 10-year-old daughter Ellen spent most of her waking hours singing to the original Broadway cast recording of the musical Hamilton. When it was announced that Hamilton would be coming to the Kennedy Center, my wife and I decided that taking our daughter to see this historic performance would be worth the cost of admission even if it meant that we would have to take out a second mortgage. We felt that it was important that our daughter see the majesty of the Kennedy Center as well as the actual play, so she could put a face to her recently expanded vocabulary words of “bastard” and “whore” which she learned within the first minute of listening to the soundtrack’s opener.
Our son, who said he would rather watch a 24-hour marathon of the television show “Caillou” while wearing a Yankees’ hat, politely declined our offer to join us at the Kennedy Center. We kept the Sunday matinee a surprise from our daughter until we parked in a garage near the Kennedy Center. Her look of awe will stay with me until my dying day.
“What is that shithole?” she asked when she first gazed upon the historic arts center.
I was a bit taken aback as well as aghast and astounded along with a handful of other words that begin with the letter “A”.
“Excuse me!” I reprimanded her. “Only presidents who lose by nearly 3 million in the popular vote are able to use such language.”
“Sorry,” she apologized. “But I would never set foot in a place of such squalor.”
“Not even to see Hamilton?” my wife entreated.
“Can I keep my eyes closed until the curtain rises?” my daughter asked.
We agreed to lead her into the Kennedy Center with her eyes squinched shut and even had a few employees helpfully ask if they could offer assistance with our ‘blind’ daughter. My daughter was incensed by the response from these employees.
“I would never accept help from them,” she sneered. “Even blind, I can see that they are very bad at their jobs and should be fired without warning. I wish we had a president who could see as clearly as I do about this dump.”
We continued our walk through the majestic halls, with our daughter tripping every so often on uneven slabs of flooring while my wife and I exchanged a knowing glance. We were sad that our daughter was missing the architectural brilliance of the Kennedy Center, but our glance, full of knowledge, indicated that we both realized it was probably best that she had her eyes shut to avoid seeing all of the rats that were lounging about and eating brie cheese.
Before we could reach the theater, I had to pull my daughter to one side just in time to avoid a large piece of plaster ceiling crashing to the floor near us.
“What was that?” she asked, still refusing to open her eyes.
“Nothing, my dear. Just the building pulsating with the promise of Hercules Mulligan.”
“It sounded a lot like ornamental molding falling from the ceiling,” my daughter said.
In that moment, I wondered if Lin Manuel Miranda could have written a song about cornices instead of Alexander Hamilton’s early life in the Virgin Islands. We finally made our way to our seats, and my daughter opened her eyes for the first time since we had entered the building. Her breath caught.
“Our little stage at Battlefield Elementary is nicer than this dung heap,” she said. “How has this place stayed open for 47 years? Someone really needs to spend a couple hundred million dollars to remodel this place in 2019 and then shut it down for two years in 2026 to remodel it all over again for a few hundred million more.”
She quieted her complaints about the hall once the curtain rose and was entranced for the entire performance except during the intermission when she asked an usher if they had hard hats to prevent closed head injuries during Act II. Hamilton was everything we had hoped it would be. My daughter walked out of the theater humming “Stay Alive” with her eyes open the whole time, although she did seem perplexed as to why there were hundreds of rats standing outside on the terrace vaping.
As we walked to our car, all of us holding hands, I had a few moments to reflect on the day and the joys of musical theater. Once again, I was reminded that art can transcend the confines of even the shitholiest of theaters. I also realized that no amount of off-white marble was going to detract from the fact that we had given our daughter a memory that would last forever, and we were all thankful that we had somehow made it out of that aging deathtrap of a venue.
I realized, too, that I was wistful for the sights, sounds, and even the smells of the 9:30 Club. (RIP Rob Reiner.)
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