C2 EZ RE KK THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 , 2019
parents. Mario, I’m ready to talk
when you are.”
That kind of backlash
apparently prompted Lopez to
rethink his stance. “The
comments I made were ignorant
and insensitive, and I now have a
deeper understanding of how
hurtful they were,” Lopez said in
a statement Wednesday. “I have
been and always will be an
ardent supporter of the LGBTQ
community, and I am going to
use this opportunity to better
educate myself. Moving forward
I will be more informed and
thoughtful.”
In the Owens interview, Lopez
said that he thought the
“formative years” — when a child
is older — “is when you start
having those conversations and
making those declarations.”
It was clear during the
interview that Lopez didn’t
intend to wade into controversial
waters. When Owens brought up
actress Zoe Saldana and her
husband’s decision not to model
gender stereotypes for their
children, Lopez says he
intentionally doesn’t weigh in on
other people’s parenting, even if
he disagrees with it. “I worry
about what goes on at Casa
Lopez and focus on me and
mine,” he said.
When Owens pressed him
about play dates in which his
kids might spend time at other
homes where parents were
“confusing people” about gender,
he said that wasn’t a problem.
“They don’t kick it with those
kids,” he replied.
Elsewhere in the interview,
Lopez noted that he typically
steers clear of divisive issues like
politics or religion. “I’m in the
people business, and I don’t
want to alienate anyone. I want
everyone to want to watch me.”worker I am trained to identify
abuse or neglect of a child.
Healthy & safe dialogue w/ kids
is neither abusive, neglectful or
‘dangerous.’ ”
Brown, though, said the
backlash could be a chance for
the “Saved by the Bell” actor to
learn. “I don’t think
@MarioLopezExtra should be
‘canceled,’ ” he wrote in a follow-
up tweet. “But I do believe he
should be given the opportunity
to learn why his comments are
harmful to trans youth and theirsocial media, where it was met
with criticism. “Mario Lopez’s
comments are dangerous to the
safety and well-being of LGBTQ
youth, especially trans children
who deserve to be loved and
accepted for who they are,” read
a tweet by the Human Rights
Campaign. Karamo Brown of
“Queer Eye” also weighed in:
“I’m disappointed to read
@MarioLopezExtra comments
about parent’s who support their
child’s [openness] about their
gender identity. As a sociallove, you really can’t go wrong,”
he started out. “But at the same
time, my God, if you’re 3 years
old and you’re saying you’re
feeling a certain way or you
think you’re a boy or a girl or
whatever the case may be, I just
think it’s dangerous as a parent
to make that determination
then, okay, then you’re going to
be a boy or a girl.... It’s sort of
alarming, and, my gosh, I just
think about the repercussions
later on.”
That quote circulated onTV personality Mario Lopez
was dragged on Twitter — before
eventually apologizing — for
comments he made about how
it’s “dangerous” for parents to
accept that their young children
identify as transgender. The
“Access Hollywood” host made
the remarks in a June interview
with conservative commentator
Candace Owens, but they
recently resurfaced on social
media.
During a sit-down with Lopez
on her YouTube talk show,
Owens brought up what she
called a “weird trend” in
Hollywood: children “picking
their gender,” and she cited
actress Charlize Theron’s
disclosure that one of the
children she adopted is now
living as a girl. Owens called it a
“new Hollywood mentality” and
a “really scary trend.” “It’s virtue
signaling,” she said. “Like, ‘I’m so
tolerant and so accepting that
whatever my kid wants to do
they can do.’ ”
Lopez’s response didn’t quite
go as far as Owens did. “I’m
never one to tell anyone how to
parent their kids, obviously.... I
think if you come from a place of
“I go every year to different
orchestras,” said Leslie Silverfine, a
violinist and the chairwoman of
the orchestra’s union, the National
Philharmonic Players’ Committee.
“I’m playing every weekend.”
But nothing, Silverfine said, is
as regular as the National Philhar-
monic. “I’ve played there for 32
years,” she said. “We really care
about this orchestra. We’re kind of
like a family, because we’ve been
together for so long. We don’t want
to see it go away.”
If the board doesn’t support Kel-
ly’s plan, it may face a challenge in
getting the support of the musi-
cians, who voted to play for an-
other year under the same terms if
Kelly takes over.
“The orchestra will not play un-
der the current management,” Sil-
verfine said. “Even if the board
decides to stay with the current
management, they’d have to hire
all new people.”
After Kelly’s meeting on Mon-
day, board members said they
would convene an emergency ses-
sion to discuss the proposal, but
the timing of that was not an-
nounced.
“For me, as president of the
organization, that’s not my
charge,” Ferfolia said. “It’s the
board’s responsibility to take that
into consideration. I would have
preferred and certainly the com-
munity would have preferred that
we all be united and work toward a
common goal as an organization.”
[email protected]rection from the board has not
been great guidance.” The extreme
fundraising efforts, Kelly added,
“should have been done months
ago.”
Ferfolia, also a trained musician
who has spent the past 17 years
working in orchestral administra-
tion, also believes in the benefits of
a strategic plan. When she took
over in 2016, she brought in con-
sultants to guide the orchestra
through an extensive self-evalua-
tion and planning process. Some of
the underlying problems, she said,
are the large debt the orchestra
had accumulated before she took
charge and a small endowment.
Having made a number of changes
stipulated by the Montgomery
County Council — including diver-
sifying repertoire, ostensibly to
reach a broader audience — she
reported to the council last fall that
the orchestra had no cushion
should a season underperform —
as last season did.
One thing is certain: The
$150,000 shortfall does not repre-
sent much of the orchestra’s an-
nual $2 million operating budget.
The National Philharmonic,
founded 36 years ago as the Mont-
gomery County Chamber Orches-
tra, is the only professional orches-
tra based in Montgomery County
and is among the largest regional
orchestras in the DMV area. It
draws its players from a pool of 300
freelance musicians, who typically
piece their livelihoods together by
working for a variety of orchestras.to decide what to do with all of
this bounty — and with the two
competing plans — so its season
can start as announced Sept. 21.
Kelly’s plan is not as far-fetched
as it may sound. He has played
with the orchestra for six seasons
and worked as its personnel man-
ager for the past two. Before Kelly’s
meeting with the board Monday,
the orchestra’s musicians — whose
contract expired June 30 — voted
unanimously to support him. Also
on his bandwagon are the National
Philharmonic’s founder and music
director, Piotr Gajewski; the artis-
tic director of the National Phil-
harmonic Chorale, Stan Engebret-
son; and some board members
who worked with him on the plan.
Kelly also said he wants the presi-
dent’s job only for a year, without
pay. (Gajewski and Engebretson
have agreed to work without pay
for a year as well, amounting, Kelly
said, to an additional savings of
$140,000.)
“This is not a power trip for me
at all,” Kelly, 42, said Tuesday. “I feel
an obligation to do this because no
one else is rising up. I know I can
do this, and I know I can surround
myself with the right team. I will
work with consultants to do a full
audit and pass the torch to some-
one much more qualified.
“I am not throwing manage-
ment under the bus. Executive
management has worked really,
really hard, and tirelessly. But di-
PHILHARMONIC FROM C1
The Reliable Source
Helena Andrews-Dyer and Emily HeilGOT A TIP? EMAIL US AT [email protected]. FOR THE LATEST SCOOPS, VISIT WASHINGTONPOST.COM/RELIABLESOURCE @helena_andrews @emilyaheil
Trans kids
comments
land Lopez
in hot water
‘Access Hollywood’
star apologizes for
‘ignorant’ remarks
President Trump has been
publicly calling for the release of
rapper A$AP Rocky from
custody in Sweden — and now
he’s sent a representative to the
country where the rapper is on
trial.
The president’s special envoy
for hostage affairs, Robert C.
O’Brien, is in Stockholm “on a
mission for POTUS,” a senior
State Department official told
The Washington Post. “The goal
is to bring Rocky, Bladimir and
David home to their friends and
families in America. The time for
their release is now,” the official
said, referring to the rapper and
his co-defendants, Bladimir
Emilio Corniel and David
Tyrone Rispers. The trio have
pleaded not guilty to charges
stemming from an altercation in
Stockholm in late June.
Trump has taken an intense
interest in the case, initially at
the behest of Kim Kardashian
and Kanye West, who appealed
to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner. Trump tweeted that he
was “disappointed” in Prime
Minister Stefan Lofven and later
insulted the relationship
between the United States and
the Scandinavian country.
“We do so much for Sweden
but it doesn’t seem to work the
other way around,” he wrote.
“Sweden should focus on its real
crime problem! #FreeRocky.”U.S. envoy seeks
Rocky’s release
Our president is a flaming racist... We need to get him out of office.”
— Singer and not-too-secret Trump critic John Legend, in an interview with TMZ. Responding to President Trump’s recent verbal attacks on Baltimore, the EGOT winner
emphasized that the city’s issues have been decades in the making and then called Trump, among other unprintable names, an evil “canker sore on America’s landscape.”THEO WARGO/GETTY IMAGES
Mario Lopez agreed with Candace Owens that it was “dangerous” for young kids to declare their sex.ERIK SIMANDER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Robert C. O’Brien arrives at the
court for A$AP Rocky’s trial.LEON BENNETT/GETTYBY MICHAEL DIRDAInitially published in 1928, W.
Somerset Maugham’s “Ashenden”
is usually described as the first
modern espionage novel. In reali-
ty, it’s a collection of linked stories
based on the author’s actual ex-
periences while running spies
during World War I. The action
opens with Ashenden’s recruit-
ment into the Secret Service by R.
— just the initial — and ends in
1917 with the outbreak of the Rus-
sian Revolution. While not in the
least like a James Bond thriller,
Maugham’s golden-age classic is
equally compelling in its own way,
just right for late summer escape
reading.
In his autobiographical reflec-
tions, “The Summing Up,”
Maugham recalled that “in my
twenties the critics said I was bru-
tal, in my thirties they said I was
flippant, in my forties they said I
was cynical, in my fifties they said
I was competent, and now in my
sixties they say I am superficial.”
What all these judgments really
mean is that he was a pure profes-
sional. A Somerset Maugham sto-
ry is always a story, not a literary
experiment or tendentious social
document. More often than not, it
takes the form of a confession.
Ashenden, for example, en-
counters both commonplace and
supremely cosmopolitan men and
women, nearly all of them living
with broken hearts or broken
dreams. They include the aged but
enigmatic Miss King, who has
spent decades as a governess in
the family of an Egyptian prince;
the dandyish assassin known as
“the hairless Mexican”; an Italian
prostitute who is callously manip-
ulated to destroy the one man she
has ever loved; and a quite amia-
ble English traitor who adores
wildflowers.
While no one denies
Maugham’s gifts as a storyteller,
his prose has regularly been dis-
missed as pedestrian. Not so. It is
plain, direct, natural, the language
of a well-educated, civilized Eng-
lishman. If you would write per-
fectly, Maugham once declared,
you should write as clearly, as
urbanely as Voltaire, which is just
what he himself tries to do. Of the
Baroness von Higgins, a seductive
German agent with a flamboyant
décolletage, Maugham notes that“the sight of her alone must have
aroused, in anyone on whom she
desired to exercise her wiles, the
sense of prudence.” He can also be
as worldly-wise as La Rochefou-
cauld: “It is very hard for a man,
however modest, to grasp the pos-
sibility that a woman who has
once loved him may love him no
longer.”
Maugham’s particular strength
as a writer lies in his establish-
ment of a close intimacy between
his viewpoint character — typical-
ly a version of himself — and the
reader. We learn, for instance, that
Ashenden’s favorite food is maca-
roni, that he enjoys daydreaming
in hot baths and that he plays
bridge and likes to read novels in
the evening. He also values the
perks of being a somewhat cel-
ebrated playwright and author,
though there
are drawbacks:
“He sighed
when eager
young students
of the drama
sought to dis-
cuss its tech-
nique with him,
and when gush-
ing ladies trem-
ulously whispered in his ear their
admiration of his books he often
wished he were dead.” In general,
Ashenden-Maugham tries to be
both spectator and actor in “the
pleasant comedy of life,” which
means that “people sometimes
thought him heartless because he
was more often interested in oth-
ers than attached to them.”
To all his adventures and mis-
adventures, Ashenden brings a
cool, observational acuity. He
notes R.’s gaucheness around
upper-class women, recognizes
that an Irish colonel’s wife has
never in her life opened a restau-
rant door by herself, and quickly
deduces that the British govern-
ment’s best spy simply makes up
his reports about German military
operations while seated at his
kitchen table. In one episode, Ash-
enden reluctantly listens as a stiff,
middle-aged diplomat unexpect-
edly bares his soul. Wild, passion-
ate love — for a vulgar third-rate
actress named Alix — had almost
wrecked his life, but he made the
sensible choice and married the
pretty blue blood who could help
his career. “Oh, he made a successof life and there were hundreds
who envied him. It was all ashes.
He was bored, bored to distrac-
tion, bored by that distinguished,
beautiful lady he had married,
bored by the people his life forced
him to live with; it was a comedy
he was playing and sometimes it
seemed intolerable to live forever
and ever behind a mask; some-
times he felt he couldn’t bear it.
But he bore it. Sometimes he
longed for Alix so fiercely that he
felt it would be better to shoot
himself than to suffer so much
anguish. He never saw her again.
Never.” Disillusionment has al-
ways been Maugham’s chief
theme.
In general, the stories in “Ash-
enden” fall into two types: Some
show the influence of Maupassant
and end with an unexpected
shock, while others seem like al-
most Chekhovian portraits of hu-
man frailty and misery. Yet both
types can come across, at the be-
ginning, as lightly comic. On one
occasion Ashenden spends 11 days
on the Trans-Siberian Express in
the company of an endearingly
fussy American on a business trip
to Russia: “Mr. Harrington was
devoted to his wife and he told
Ashenden at unbelievable length
how cultivated and what a perfect
mother she was. She had delicate
health and had undergone a great
number of operations, all of which
he described in detail. He had had
two operations himself, one on his
tonsils and one to remove his ap-
pendix, and he took Ashenden day
by day through his experiences.
All his friends had had operations
and his knowledge of surgery was
encyclopedic.” Mr. Harrington ul-
timately pays a high price for his
American innocence.
Like John le Carré, Somerset
Maugham depicts espionage as
tawdry, morally problematic,
heartless and frequently ineffec-
tual. But then, again like le Carré,
he knows what he’s talking about.
It’s been rumored that Maugham
wrote as many as 14 additional
stories about Ashenden’s war
service, but that Winston
Churchill told him they violated
the Official Secrets Act. They were
all burned.
[email protected]Michael Dirda reviews books each
Thursday in Style.BOOK WORLDMaugham, Somerset Maugham:
The birth of the modern spy novel
Orchestra board faces competing plans
JOSHUA COGANPiotr Gajewski leads the National Philharmonic in a concert last season at Strathmore. The founder
and music director is one of the supporters of violinist James Kelly’s plan to fund the orchestra.