Golden days: The almost

Oct 08, 2023

This is what everyone knows about Washington summers: They’re hot. Oppressively, obscenely, crushingly hot. Tar-on-the-road-shifting-from-a-solid-to-a-liquid hot.

This is what not everyone knows about Washington summers: They’re also kind of great. Forget the heat. Focus on the breeze cooling patrons at a rooftop bar overlooking U Street. Listen for the ice cream trucks serenading the city. Notice the linen dresses, the lightened traffic, the collective shift toward levity.

In the summer, Washington is a little less capital of the free world, a little more “Our Town.” Senators skip town, staffers exhale. Concerts are outside, under the stars. Fireflies blink. Afternoon storms rage with a force that leaves you no choice but to stare out the window, thinking, “Glad I’m not outside in that.”

Summer is the season of unstructured hours. Of days where, every once in a while, everything seems to go just right. Or all wrong, but in the most magical ways. We asked eight notable Washingtonians — some who grew up here, others who live here now — to recall their just-about-perfect summer memories. The ones that seem, now, bathed in a kind of golden light.

The ones that remind us of everything that makes Washington summers, well, kind of great.

Albert Ting wanted to be among the sunflowers. He wanted to be among rows and rows of them, in the kind of place that might make you feel as if you’ve tripped into a Van Gogh painting. He wanted to go and make his own art, yes, but also just make a little fun. So in mid-July 2013, the photographer, who was then 34, recruited his friend Jenn Wurzbacher for an adventure. Ting got himself dandied up in a seersucker ensemble and straw hat and gathered his favorite props: a stuffed animal, a parasol, and his grandfather’s Rolleiflex camera, the boxy kind that was introduced almost a century ago.

The pair drove from D.C. to McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area, a sunflower hotbed in Poolsville, Md. He and Jenn — in a vintage dress, of course — unloaded their props from the car and began snapping photos: of the flowers, the parasol, the stuffed animal, each other. There were no rules, no requirements, no pressing time constraints. If anything, it felt as if they’d found a way of pressing time, of transporting themselves to an era when beauty and art and leisure were paramount.

Jenn snapped one photo of Ting staring down the viewfinder of the Rolleiflex. “The viewfinder is on the top of the Rolleiflex,” he says, “and it’s kind of interesting just to see the world through that kind of rose-colored lens.”

As the sun sank, they happened upon a hidden trail and wandered down to the bank of the Potomac River, where they rested before the rushing water. Mosquitoes swarmed, but Ting was hardly bothered. He was too busy watching the sky transform from bubble-gum pinks to rich purples.

Sometimes the world is rose-colored all on its own.

Louis Bayard was 19 and hellbent on one thing: seeing Lena Horne in concert. But it was 1983, and none of his buddies even knew who Horne was — they sure weren’t going to be shelling out cash to spend an evening with the silky-voiced silver screen star, who was, by then, in her 60s.

The only person willing to come to the concert with Bayard was his older brother, Chris. The Bayard brothers took their parents’ car to Wolf Trap, listening to WHFS radio, the preferred station of “all of the cool kids.” Other concertgoers had elaborate spreads of charcuterie on gingham picnic blankets. The Bayards sat on the ground at dusk, sharing a bottle of wine and either fried chicken or burgers — who can remember? — but certainly “something lame and bachelor-ish.”

When the sky darkened, Lena Horne appeared. Bayard spent the next two hours entranced by her voice, her beauty, her endurance as she danced back and forth across the stage.

“I just sat there in awe. I know she was somewhat ambivalent about her own career because she had to face so many barriers and so much racism. And yet there was none of that onstage. She was just so present, so there,” Bayard says. Horne performed her own discography, as well as songs from her films, including “Believe in Yourself” from “The Wiz.”

For Bayard, though, the climax of the concert came toward the end of the set, when Horne sang one of her most famous songs, “Stormy Weather.”

“The power and the ferocity and the passion of her voice — it just seemed to have sort of a supernatural impact,” he says. “So much of it was just from her soul. The great singers give us their soul, one way or another, quietly or passionately.”

Forty years later, Bayard can still transport himself back to that summer evening. It’s rare to encounter such a spectacular force. And that night, he says, Lena Horne was “like lightning.”

Early on the morning of the Georgia Avenue Day Parade and Festival in the late 1980s or early 1990s, Edwina Findley dragged her mother, Rose, out of the house. They lived only a couple of blocks away from the parade, so traffic wasn’t a concern, but young Findley wanted to make sure she had the best possible view of one of her favorite D.C. events. Every year, it seemed like a miracle: Her neighborhood transformed, for the day, into a cultural celebration, bursting with music, pageantry and performance.

Findley remembers trying to follow the parade, and occasionally attempting to join it and march among the participants, before her mother would scoop her up and return her to her place among the viewers.

She was especially enamored with the marching bands and dancers. Howard University students would march through the streets and she would dream about marching alongside them. At lunchtime, her food of choice was a D.C. steak and cheese topped with mumbo sauce. She felt as though she were standing in the epicenter of D.C. Black culture, surrounded by kente cloth garments: hues of sandy oranges, royal blues and rich greens woven in complex patterns. Go-go beats and gospel music perfumed the air around her. Black politicians, including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Mayor Marion Barry, would rouse the crowds. Findley looked on, absorbing all of it and hoping, one day, to be in the spotlight. The parade — in addition to frequent trips to local stages and Shakespeare presentations with her mother, and her involvement in children’s theater programs — ignited Findley’s desire to be onstage.

“It just showed me what was possible,” she says. “It gave me vision in life, and it made me inspired to create my own career as an artist and to find different ways of celebrating my culture. … As a young Black girl growing up in Washington, I just felt so proud of my culture, so proud to be African American.”

A summer downpour once led chef Rob Rubba to change his afternoon plans — a change, it turns out, that unlocked a course-altering professional insight. In 2019, Rubba’s fellow chef and friend Andrew McCabe visited from Louisville to investigate the D.C. pizza scene. Rubba was in the process of opening Oyster Oyster, the restaurant in Northwest Washington where his work would eventually earn him a 2023 James Beard Award.

The duo planned to take a pizza tour of the District, then drive into Maryland to secure some blue crabs for McCabe. That morning, they scoped out Oyster Oyster’s future home and visited the Wharf for lunch. As they ate, sheets of rain began dumping onto the streets. Worried the storm would make the drive into Maryland a traffic-choked nightmare, they abandoned their plans and decided instead to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

As he read about the Indigenous food sources of Mid-Atlantic tribes, Rubba got a jolt. The chef, who was still conceptualizing exactly what he wanted Oyster Oyster to be, had already been interested in Indigenous food. This — the altered plans, the happenstance encounter with this particular exhibit — felt divined.

He knew what he wanted to do: “start working a lot more with foragers and understand what ingredients are here in the Mid-Atlantic, particularly in our region, and to utilize those on the menu.”

Rubba couldn’t have known, then, how celebrated his restaurant — and its use of local plants — would someday become. He just knew that something important had stirred inside him, and it wouldn’t have happened if not for that storm.

After a couple more hours of museum strolling, Rubba and McCabe made their way to 2Amys Neapolitan Pizzeria for a slice.

Suddenly, it seemed, everything was crystal clear.

For the first 12 years of Tim Gunn’s life, there was talk of air conditioning, but he’d come to believe it was just that: talk.

Gunn, a fifth-generation Washingtonian, lived in the Cleveland Park house that his great-grandfather built. As in most houses at the time, there was no air conditioning, which made summer in the swamp almost intolerable. The family had discussed adding AC for years, but his father worried about the cost. So on hot days, the family would squeeze onto a screened-in porch, willing the sun to set.

Then, one day in the mid-1960s, just as the weather was starting to turn from springy to sticky, three men showed up at the Gunn residence with something beautiful: a central air-conditioning unit. Gunn remembers the effort it took to carry the unit up to the attic and that the entrance was so small that a section had to be carved out of the ceiling to make it fit. He remembers that a new fuse box had to be added to accommodate the compressor. And he remembers that he didn’t give a lick about what had to be done to make that thing work.

“I thought, ‘We’re getting air conditioning. Who cares how much trouble this is and the tribulations that are associated with it?’”

Finally, after hours of work, those first blessed puffs of cool air pumped into the Gunn household. That evening, thunder shook the house and rain poured down. On any previous night, that kind of storm would have been an invitation to open a window in search of a breeze or a temperature drop. Now it was just a show. One that Gunn could simply watch from the comfort of his climate-controlled home.

There are two things Courtney Kolker especially loves about life in the D.C. area. The first is the opportunity to meet visitors who come to the city from across the world. The other is D.C. sports. That second one might come as a surprise to people who only know Kolker as an abstract artist in residence at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, where she specializes in vibrant splashes of acrylic on canvas.

But Kolker’s connection to sports is in her blood: Her uncle was a play-by-play announcer for the Wizards, and her father worked for the Capital One Arena back when it was called the MCI Center. So when Kolker, now 39, heard that German soccer team Bayern Munich would be playing a friendly match against D.C. United in July 2022, she knew she had to be there. It was the perfect union of her favorite things.

Kolker enlisted a few friends and secured tickets. Then, on game day, she made her way to Navy Yard. The street outside Audi Field was lined with kids gleefully shooting goals and flaunting their skills at pop-up soccer challenges. Once Kolker found her friends, they wove their way through the crowd into the stadium.

Audi Field was packed with spectators, and the humid air felt electric. Kolker, a lifelong soccer fan, knew that things wouldn’t go well for D.C. United against such a prestigious European team. (Indeed, they lost 6-2.) But that was almost beside the point. They were there, in the sun, watching the beautiful game played beautifully, with like-minded fans from around the globe.

After the match, Kolker and her friends headed to a nearby bar, the Salt Line. There they met a crew of German fans who had traveled to Washington to watch the friendly. Kolker gave them insider D.C. instructions: Head to 14th Street to find the best dive bars and restaurants.

Kolker and her friends lingered that evening. And the day still lingers in her mind. Thinking of it reminds the artist of what’s great about her hometown. The crowd at an international soccer friendly, she says, is “going to be an eclectic group in the best way.”

But that’s the truth about much of life in Washington, isn’t it? It’s always going to be eclectic — almost always in the best way.

Ashley Smith showed up on the steps of the Supreme Court around 7 a.m. For most of the next four hours, he stood in the beating sun, watching the building’s door as the throngs of people around him swelled. Every time someone emerged from the court, the crowd snapped to attention, only to be deflated by false alarm after false alarm. And then, like a ray of light, he saw his friend Jim Obergefell descend from the courthouse with a smile on his face.

June 26, 2015, was the day that marriage equality became federally recognized in the United States. At the time, Smith was national co-chair of the Human Rights Campaign, in addition to his work in the hospitality industry. He was also a gay man who had not yet come out to many of his co-workers. Smith had known Obergefell through his work at the HRC, and when the two finally found their way to each other, both men cried.

“To just share that moment … there are not words that you need to say because we were just so overjoyed,” Smith says. “The whole purpose of doing it was a huge risk, and [Obergefell] did it. He wanted to be able to take John [Arthur, Obergefell’s partner who died in 2013] as his husband.”

Smith gave media interviews in front of the courthouse, including one on CNN where he expressed his identity as a gay man to the world.

“I’m not always out at work, but many people saw me on the news and they were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you were there. You were part of this. We didn’t know, congratulations.’”

After the ruling, Smith rushed home to change clothes before heading to the White House, which he’d heard would be lit up in the colors of the Pride flag. There were interviews and photos and more interviews. There were tears, and then awe when first lady Michelle Obama and her two daughters, Sasha and Malia, appeared for a split-second to look at the crowd. As the day turned to night, more and more people flocked to the White House, cheering, embracing and dancing in the glow of the rainbow light.

Diedrich Bader heard his friend John call his given name from across the lawn of the Capitol building: “Karl. Karl!”

Bader continued to run through the sprinklers, ignoring the summons.

“Karl,” repeated another, deeper voice through a crackling megaphone. This time, 19-year-old Bader froze. His heart pounded. He padded, dripping water, over to his friend, who was accompanied by a Capitol Police officer.

Bader, an Alexandria native, had just finished his first year of college and was back goofing off with his buddies from T.C. Williams High School (now called Alexandria City High School). That day, in the mid-1980s, Bader and five of his friends had commandeered his grandmother’s purple Buick convertible and driven up the GW Parkway to Great Falls. They climbed down the jagged rocks and took a dip in the water next to the falls, despite the multiple advisories against doing so. “I probably still have a staph infection,” Bader jokes. At lunchtime, they inhaled the sandwiches that Bader’s mother had packed, then piled back into the Buick.

They had a little gas and a few bucks. They had everything.

Eventually, the troupe arrived at a dive bar, where they scarfed down fatty burgers with a wisp of lettuce and a thought of tomato. There was no air conditioning, so the only source of coolness was the short-lived condensation on their cheep beers and the periodic gusts of air that came when the grouchy waitress, Mary, would snap her dish towel at the boys for putting their feet up on the table. They departed shortly after the clock struck midnight and coasted through the Capitol Hill neighborhood, going nowhere in particular. Out of the corner of his eye, Bader spotted the Capitol building — and then something more intriguing. Sprinklers that keep the lawn perfectly manicured were peppering water across the grass. The car ground to a halt, and the boys sprinted for the sprinklers.

“It felt really childish and subversive and cool all at the same time,” Bader says. “Like we were kids again, even though we were just saying goodbye to being kids.”

Then Bader heard the megaphone.

“[The police officer] goes, ‘Are you Karl?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And he goes, ‘You running through the sprinklers?’ and I go, ‘Yes, sir. I certainly was.’ He says, ‘Next time you want to run through the sprinklers, you’ve got to pull the car over to the side of the road.’ I didn’t realize I had just stopped the car. I hadn’t pulled over at all. I just stopped it in the lane.”

To Bader’s relief, the officer let them go. The friends loaded back into the Buick and drove home under a bright moon. They were damp, laughing and not quite done being kids.

What’s your just-about-perfect D.C. summer memory? Tell us about it in the comments below.