Rockwellian innocence lost on D.C.

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This article was published 07/08/2010 (5577 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

11D.C. SUPERIOR COURT

COMMUNITY SERVICE

“What did you do to deserve this?” I asked Williams, who is a 26-year-old native of the capital’s sadly neglected Southeast section, a neighborhood that is diagonally opposite in its location and its aspirations to the shining towers, marble monuments, great museums and million-dollar houses of Northwest.

“D.U.I.,” he replied. This was shorthand for driving under the influence.

“Under the influence of what?” I wondered.

“Grey Goose,” Terence Williams smiled.

He laughed and nodded when I said, “Well, if you’re gonna get caught, it might as well be with the good stuff!”

Williams told me that he had been offered the chance to avoid imprisonment by agreeing to empty the garbage bins of Ninth Street in 99-degree weather.

One hundred and eight hours of street cleaning, he said, and he will have wiped his slate clean.

“If I mess up at this,” he said, “I’ll have to go to jail.”

We talked for a few minutes about the career prospects for a young man from Southeast Washington, for which the word “bleak” seems to have been invented. Williams told me that he’s never had a full-time job, but that he had been accepted into Project Empowerment, a program for the unemployed youth and ex-felons of the capital’s untouristed nether-lands.

“When you were young,” I asked Terence Williams, “what was your dream?”

“To get a million dollars,” he replied.

“That’s not gonna happen,” I predicted.

“I’m still chasin’ my dream,” Terence Williams said.

“Is the government focused enough on creating jobs?” I wondered.

“They should be focused on terrorism,” he answered. “Those guys could come over here and wipe us out.”

Directly across the street from where we were chatting was the columned colossus of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. While Terence Williams sweated off his debt to society, I went inside to see a new exhibition entitled Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

The galleries were packed on a weekday morning. (Admission to all the Smithsonian museums is free.) On the walls were several dozen of Rockwell’s depiction of an apple-for-the-teacher, all-white, small-town America, owned and loaned by the two famous Hollywood directors who claimed, in a loop being shown in the gallery, that the Vermonter’s art was the inspiration for their cinematic careers.

“Little bits of our culture, captured like snapshots,” Lucas was quoted on the wall above one display.

But random snapshots were exactly what these paintings were not.

Cinematically cast, rehearsed, photographed, staged, posed and re-posed by the painter himself, they were still-frames from one-man’s movie about this country that took Norman Rockwell 60 years to film, print, and play.

That familiar Rockwellian innocence made up much of the display — a preening girl’s first trip to the hair salon; a wide-eyed lad (Rockwell’s own son) crawling, terrified, to the tip of the high diving board — but there also was a naughty side I hadn’t expected, with several panels that featured haughty young hotties in tight blouses being ogled by truckers and window washers.

(There even was a full-figured mermaid being hauled home in a lobster trap by a lucky old salt, Rockwell’s first published nude. He was 61 when it appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.)

“They depict hope and patriotism — that’s America,” a young Londoner named Nick Godley told me when I talked with some of the attendees. “It’s so typically how we see an America of a bygone age, if it ever really was that way. And even if it wasn’t, I think we all still hanker after that.”

“It was real,” a woman from rural Wisconsin insisted.

“You bet,” her younger sister concurred.

“Probably right up to the Kennedy era,” said the older woman.

“In our town, it still is,” said the younger.

These were Shirley Multhauf and Fredericka Noordyke of Stevens Point, two Daughters of the American Revolution — you must be descended from an 18th-century patriot to qualify — in town for a convocation.

“What do you see outside this building?” I asked the sisters.

“I see people in desperate need,” Noordyke said.

Outside the building, Terence Williams was wheeling his cart and emptying the trash cans and wearing his red vest and chasing his dream.

“It’s very clean here, and orderly,” Nick Godley said. “It’s the capital, after all.”

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist

based in Washington, D.C.