The Washington Post - USA (2020-07-31)

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FRIDAY, JULY 31 , 2020. SECTION C EZ RE

BY HANK STUEVER

D

ocumentaries are doing a

bang-up job lately of helping

women reclaim their stories.

Earlier this year, Nanette

Burstein’s absorbing four-part

Hulu docuseries “Hillary” turned a trove

of unseen 2016 campaign footage into a

surprisingly frank rumination on the life

and career of Hillary Clinton, this time

viewed through the prism of the sexist

double standards that dogged her the

entire way.

Nina Simone, Jane Fonda, Joan Rivers,

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lorena Bobbitt —

thoughtful documentaries about each

have helped push the biographical for-

mat well past its standard of reverent clip

jobs, perceiving their subjects in a more

truthful and encompassing light. Time

and context are given the opportunity to

overcome old hype and headlines.

In the pop-music world, no group of

women could be more deserving of a

fresh and fair shake than the Go-Go’s,

whose success/implosion story in the

MTV era still resonates with anyone who

loved them in the 1980s, as well as the

fans who’ve come along since.

Emerging from a Los Angeles punk

scene that was more giddy than gritty,

these five musicians — Charlotte Caffey,

Belinda Carlisle, Gina Schock, Kathy

Valentine and Jane Wiedlin — remain

the only all-female rock act to write and

play their own songs on a debut album

(1981’s “Beauty and the Beat”) that

reached No. 1 on the sales charts. There

was no man standing behind the curtain

calling the shots, no Svengali.

“People automatically assume that we

were probably put together by some guy,

but we did it ourselves,” Carlisle observes

at the beginning of filmmaker Alison

Ellwood’s fast and fantastic documen-

tary, “The Go-Go’s,” which premiered

earlier this year at the Sundance Film

Festival and makes its TV debut Friday

on Showtime.

SEE TV REVIEW ON C2

TV REVIEW

An upbeat examination of the Go-Go’s

Showtime’s documentary

looks at the 1980s band

from a fresher, more

feminist perspective

MELANIE NISSEN/SHOWTIME

Guitarist Jane Wiedlin and

vocalist Belinda Carlisle perform

with their band, the Go-Go’s,

whose 1981 debut album reached

No. 1 on the charts.

BY SARAH L. KAUFMAN

The Washington Ballet announced
Thursday that Executive Director Mi-
chael Pastreich is resigning Friday,
after 14 months on the job. His depar-
ture follows that of two previous execu-
tive directors who have left since
ballerina Julie Kent became artistic
director in 2016.
In the same announcement, the
ballet reported the postponement of all
performances t hrough 2020 because of
the pandemic, including the longtime
holiday staple “The Nutcracker.” They
will be replaced by virtual perform-
ances, such as a “create in place”
project that will stream online in
October.
Canceling “The Nutcracker” is a
financial blow to any ballet company,
but in taking this difficult step, the
Washington Ballet is not alone. New
York City Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet and
the Pennsylvania Ballet have scrapped
their “Nutcrackers” as well. The popu-
lar ballet is generally a company’s only
production to turn a profit, but the
large cast, the child performers, the
cramped backstage conditions and the
full theaters mean that social distanc-
ing measures cannot be maintained.
For the Washington Ballet, gross ticket
sales to “The Nutcracker” accounted
for $3.1 million of the ballet’s $14 mil-
lion budget for fiscal year 2020, ac-
SEE BALLET ON C3

Ballet loses top

executive, scraps

2020 shows

You may have heard

about the viral video

featuring a group of

fringe doctors spouting

dangerous falsehoods

about

hydroxychloroquine as

a covid-19 wonder cure.

In fact, it’s very

possible you saw t he video since it was

shared on social media tens of

millions of times — partly thanks to

President Trump who retweeted it

more than once, and who described

the group’s Stella Immanuel, also

known for promoting wacky notions

about demon sperm and alien DNA, as

“very impressive” and even

“spectacular.”

Given this and a few other hideous

developments, it’s time to

acknowledge the painfully obvious:

America has waved the white flag and

surrendered.

With nearly 150,000 dead from

covid-19, we’ve not only lost the

public-health war, we’ve lost the war

for truth. Misinformation and lies

have captured the castle.

And the bad guys’ most powerful

weapon? Social media — in particular,

Facebook.

Some new Pew research tells us in

painstaking numerical form exactly

what’s going on, and it’s not pretty:

Americans who rely on social media

SEE SULLIVAN ON C3

This week, we

lost the war on

misinformation

Margaret

Sullivan

BY JADA YUAN

John Lewis’s last public appearance

wasn’t supposed to be public.

Those photographs of him overlook-

ing the District’s Black Lives Matter

Plaza, 57 years after he’d been the

youngest speaker at the March on Wash-

ington, were meant to be snapshots of a

private moment as the civil rights hero

looked out on the newest manifestation

of a movement for Black freedoms that

he’d shed his own blood to advance

decades ago.

Photographer Gary Williams Jr. had

been quarantining with his parents, his

wife and their two young children in

Virginia that first weekend of June

when an unexpected message appeared

in his email. It was from Lewis’s chief of

staff, Michael Collins, asking whether

he’d be available to photograph the con-

gressman the next morning. “I’m think-

ing, this is a press thing,” Williams said.

But it was quieter than that. Washing-

ton’s mayor had authorized city workers

to write the words “Black Lives Matter”

in bold, yellow letters on a stretch of

16th Street NW near the White House.

Lewis wanted to see it for himself.

SEE LEWIS ON C3

Photographer’s

lasting image

of John Lewis

GARY D. WILLIAMS JR./CREATIVE THEORY AGENCY

Gary Williams Jr. was asked to

document Rep. John Lewis at Black

Lives Matter Plaza on June 7.