Another Amygdala Hijack Day in DC — Nostalgia for the Innocent Days
Updated: 2 days ago
Greetings and fair warning, dear friends: I started writing this piece over Labor Day weekend, and the story keeps changing under my pen — a sculpture dismantled, then sold, a closure threatened, a demolition floated. That's not an accident: it's a known tactic called "flooding the zone" — keeping us a little off-balance so we can't quite catch our footing to fight back. So here you go, read it quick — before it changes again. Or, never mind, read it at your leisure, feet up – enjoy the photos, feel the mixed feelings. It’s all ever changing.
My smile melts, gasp of breath held in my chest, hands gripping the steering wheel.
I'm gliding south along Rock Creek Parkway on a languid Labor Day, sunroof open, Sunday Kind of Love on the radio, the Potomac opening up before me — when the gleaming white marble of the Kennedy Center appears on my left – and my body, bam, reacts.
Because it knows – before my mind fully computes: the institution rising above me, dedicated as a living memorial to a president who revered the arts, is under attack by a man who despises them. (No, despise is the wrong word: he fears art and what it represents – freedom of expression, dissent, the ungovernable imagination. To an imperialist, artists aren't an afterthought: they're a nuisance, a danger. He aims to conquer them.
My friend Summer Koester just wrote about this from her vantage point in Alaska, on The Feral Stack. Up there, though, the target isn't urban institutions and the thinking inside them, but the pristine natural world itself. Same playbook, different terrain – and intrinsically interconnected.
But let's stay with the atrocities in the city...
I vanish beneath the Kennedy Center's cantilevered eaves, into the half-tunnel below the terrace where I've stood around the fountains, in concert dress sipping bubbly at intermission – and in yoga pants on quiet, patron-less mornings, striking poses beneath JFK's inspiring quotes.
"This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor."
As a trauma survivor, I'm also aware that, in the moment, in my proximity to this sacred place under attack, my body-mind is experiencing another amygdala hijack. My limbs have gone numb as adrenaline shoots through my veins – same jolt I feel as military choppers cut low over our neighborhood, rattling the windows in their frames.
Of course, these are smaller examples of bigger atrocities - wars and climate disasters and ICE raids that flood the airwaves and our nervous systems.
I blink hard, refocusing on the GPS, its voice muted, as the map guides me onto Potomac Avenue toward Memorial Bridge. But I know behind me, in my rear-view mirror, the Kennedy Center reality is not going away.
The mar on the front façade of the building, where workers stood on scaffolds for months chiseling a new name into the marble above JFK's – then, upon a judge's order, presumably undid their dirty work – is still hidden behind tarps. And, according to court filings, may be permanently unfixable.
The rainbow lights that once lit up the entire edifice for Pride and the Kennedy Center Honors – that shifted blue and yellow for Ukraine, purple for suffrage – have been replaced with a single, permanent patriotic palette.
Then there's what goes on inside – the takeover of the board – firing of the president and staff – draining of the institutional knowledge and the love and dedication that went with it. And, in turn, the withdrawal of support by both performing artists and patrons by the thousands like me.
Now, the threats to shutter the institution altogether are no longer just talk. The (new) board has voted for a two-year, $250 million closure. A federal judge has temporarily blocked it. The Department of Justice has reportedly threatened demolition if the renovation doesn't proceed on their terms. These jokers sure are good with their wrecking balls – literal, legal, figurative.
But the latest image I cannot get out of my head: the dismembering of "Blue," the post-minimalist cobalt-blue metal sculpture by Joel Shapiro that once danced, limbs akimbo, on the lawn of The Reach. I've danced with him on past visits. He's known as a "celebration of possibility."
I hearken back to that sense of possibility and power to the people I felt when The Reach launched in 2019 – expanding the Kennedy Center beyond the four walls, making the otherwise erudite arts accessible to all - thanks to the work of (now ousted) chair David Rubinstein. I attended jazz shows and open rehearsals in the new outbuildings and film festivals on the lawn. I saw free outdoor concerts where patrons took cardboard box seats from a pyramid stack and enjoyed the symphony – Beethoven to Gershwin – sipping beers or enjoying an ice creams – as kids played on the grass.
And before The Reach – all those Millennium Stage shows over the decades – Malian to Latin to Cajun-zydeco. They even let us dancers cut a rug on the red carpet before the stage. There was a brief stint post-pandemic of hipster rooftop DJ parties, where the lines to enter ran circles around the upper terrace and the bass beat thumped and you got a rare bird's eye view over the Potomac to Roosevelt Island and beyond.
But no memory of the Kennedy Center runs more nostalgic than the first – and only time – I graced the stage of the Concert Hall – not as a performer but as a member of the Walter Johnson Class of 1982. Wielding my diploma and tossing my cap and smiling for the audience of teachers, family and friends as the Instamatic cameras flashed.
All this loss hits like a gut punch – in the two long blocks and eight short seconds it takes to pass beneath the structure and back out into the light of day. People skate and cycle and stroll along the river path as if it's any other laborless Labor Day in our Capital City – and I drive to a pool party – as though nothing has changed.
When everything has changed. And we’re waking UP!
I merge onto Memorial Bridge, inhaling into my belly, coaxing my nervous system down, anticipating the pool, cool water, friends. Then the horrid sight hits – the Arts of Peace statues, Midas-touched in gold. Freshly gilded, spray-paint bright, $5.1 million worth of gaudy shine have replaced 75 years of weathered bronze character.
I cross the river. And dead ahead, as I veer into Virginia, there it is – the traffic circle where, if he gets his way, a two-hundred-fifty-foot Triumphal Arch will rise. Taller than Lincoln, it’s positioned to break the sightline, built post-Civil War, symbolically linking the North and South.
My jaw tightens, hands grip the wheel. I accelerate toward the pool party, where the atrocities will be out of sight for an afternoon – not out of mind. As, somewhere behind me, dismantled, wrapped in plastic, “Blue” waits to be told where it belongs.
The celebration of possibility is this: in just over a week we star stuck arts lovers will gather for Hands Around the Kennedy Center, forming a chain to demonstrate against authoritarian overreach into arts and culture and stand up for our freedom of expression.
Join the joyful fight! -- organized by Hands Off the Arts, Friday, September 18, 6:30–8:00 PM, at the Kennedy Center. RSVP for Hands Around the Kennedy Center →
Late-breaking, happy news! David Rubinstein, ousted KenCen chairman, just bought dismantled ‘Blue’ for $2M and will have it displayed at the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. Hooray, we will dance, again!
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