ABCDE
METRO
sunday, may 30, 2010
LOCAL HOME PAGE
74, 9 a.m. 84, noon 89, 5 p.m. 80, 9 p.m.
Obituaries Dennis Hopper, 74, the counterculture icon, enjoyed a late-career resurgence playing intense roles. C6
Capture it on film
What are you doing this summer? Show us with a 30-second video detailing how you plan to spend your time.
washingtonpost.com/local.
MEMORIAL DAY
Plotting your weekend
Details on the Rolling Thunder procession, Metrorail delays and closures, and a calendar of holiday weekend events to keep you and yours busy. C4
It all
ROBERT McCARTNEY
An equal opportunity to sacrifice
even harder for those left behind when the person killed by hostile action was female. “I don’t feel that women should be in combat. I don’t care what other countries do,” Vicki Perez said of her late daughter, Army 2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez. A roadside bomb killed the
M
lively, promising graduate of Oxon Hill High School and West Point during a combat patrol in southern Iraq in 2006. She was 23.
“My thoughts are she shouldn’t have been there. She shouldn’t have been in harm’s way,” the mother said in an interview. However, Perez also said she
respected her daughter’s choices and praised her selflessness. She recalled how her daughter persuaded a higher-ranking officer to let her lead the risky convoy on the day she died because she felt responsible for her platoon’s safety. “I know she wouldn’t have had
it any other way. If she had lost a troop, that would have been more devastating to her than losing her own life,” said Perez, who lives in Prince George’s County. “We always told Emily that whatever she decided to do, we’d support her.” Disapproving, proud or some mix of the two, Americans are increasingly having to deal with the reality that equal opportunity for women means equal opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice for one’s country. The nation’s daughters are dying under enemy fire to a far greater degree than in the past. Eighty U.S. servicewomen have died from hostile action in Iraq and Afghanistan so far, compared with 16 in World War II and only one in Vietnam. The current conflicts are the first in U.S. history where such casualties outnumber deaths from other causes. The reason is simple. Female soldiers, sailors and Marines have undertaken numerous wartime tasks that expose them to violence as never before. In previous conflicts through Vietnam, women were likely to
mccartney continued on C4
PHOTOS BY BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
In Rehoboth Beach, Del., locals such as Cheryl Blackman are seeing an influx of vacationers for Memorial Day weekend.
Back to the beach
After recession, vacationers return to coastal towns in Delaware and Maryland
by Carol Morello
A year ago, subtle signs of re- cession hovered like a cloud over the beach towns of Delaware and Maryland. Tourists delayed making hotel
reservations, then stayed for two or three days instead of a week. The breadman kept selling out of hot dog buns used for backyard and beach grilling, but had a sur- plus of restaurant dinner rolls. This year, as Memorial Day
heralds the unofficial start of summer, the sun is peeking out again for the coastal resorts of the Mid-Atlantic. That’s particularly true in Re- hoboth Beach, Del., which is fa- vored by so many Washingto- nians that it calls itself the na- tion’s summer capital. Hotel reservations are being
booked months in advance. Rev- enue from parking meters and real estate transfer taxes is up. In a rare occurrence, the weekend before Memorial Day was jammed with visitors and restau- rants, and summer rental firms
say they’re well ahead of last year. “We’re off to a decent start,” said Al Fasnacht, 81, whose fami- ly has run the Funland rides-and- games arcade on the boardwalk for almost half a century. Kiddie
rides still cost as little as 22 cents. Rehoboth’s year-round popula- tion of 1,500 swells to weekend highs of 35,000 or many more people, depending on who you ask, and there is widespread opti-
Brady Wales, 7, douses brother Jake, 8, as the
Gaithersburg residents play in the sand at Rehoboth Beach, Del., during Memorial Day weekend.
mism that this season will be bet- ter than the recession-strapped 2009.
But cost-cutting measures in- stituted last year remain in ef- fect. Thursday concerts on Reho- both Avenue have been canceled. About 20 fewer employees are on the city’s summer payroll, includ- ing police officers, street clean- ers, trash collectors and parking enforcement officers. Overtime has been canceled, raises fore- stalled. “I can’t tell you the economy is improving,” said City Manager Greg Ferrese, whose son is a laid- off plumber. “But it was a rough winter, weather-wise. I don’t know if people will say they gave up their vacation because of the snow and the recession, and they’ve got to go somewhere for a few days.”
Rehoboth has been drawing
vacationers since the 19th centu- ry. The lobby at city hall is lined with photos of three decades’ worth of Miss Delawares, who used to be crowned here until the
beach continued on C4
emorial Day is difficult for the family of any fallen soldier. It can be
sounds foreign to her
HEAD INJURY
by Brigid Schulte
Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memory wiped out. A few revive with their personality totally changed. Others die. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent. Vanderlip has never been to
Russia. She doesn’t remember ever hearing a Russian accent. She lives in Fairfax County, was born in Pennsylvania and went to college on the Eastern Shore. Yet since that fall in May 2007, the first question she gets from strangers is: “Where are you from?” “They say your life can change in an instant,” she said in what sounds like a thick Russian ac- cent. “Mine did.” For 42 years, Vanderlip, whose case is being studied at the Na- tional Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland, spoke with what NIH neurologist Allen R. Braun called a typical mid-Atlantic American accent. But since the fall, her clipped
way with consonants — dropping the final “s” from some plural words, saying “dis” and “dat” for “this” and “that,” or “wiz” instead of “with” — and her formation of vowels — “home” sounds more like “herm,” “well” sounds like “wuhl” — identify her more like a transplant from Moscow. The more fatigued she becomes, the thicker her accent grows. What she has, Braun and other
doctors say, is Foreign Accent Syndrome — a rare and little- understood medical condition that can follow a serious brain in- jury. “It does sound strange,” Braun said. “It certainly does sound like someone has a foreign accent.” The syndrome was first de- scribed by a neurologist in the closing days of World War II. A Norwegian woman hit in the head by shrapnel fell into a coma and woke up speaking with a
accent continued on C10
C
DC MD VA S
JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
Taking a tour of D.C. history
In the 1950s, a contest to celebrate the area and create the District’s official song garnered 3,628 entries. The winner, of course, drew controversy and criticism. C3
ALTERS SPEECH
Fairfax woman’s accent takes on a Russian tone
Blogger brings her readers along for the ride
by Katherine Shaver
E
m Hall peered down the side- walk outside the Rosslyn Metro station on a warm,
muggy afternoon last week and eyed the electronic sign displaying the Metrobus schedule. “Hmm, 4A, 4A,” she said to her-
self. “4B to Seven Corners? That’s too far out of the way. I guess we’ll just sit in the shade and see what comes along.” Afew minutes later, Hall hopped aboard a 3A bus, headed to the East Falls Church Metro station. During the 20-minute ride, she gave the Lee Highway line high marks for relatively few turns and stops, but with buses running up to an hour
apart, it would lose points for fre- quency.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 as the best, Hall awarded it a 7. She also scratched another Metrobus line — and, after reaching East Falls Church, another Metrorail station — off her list. Hall, 30, is on a one-year quest to
visit every Metrorail station and ride every Metrobus line. Her count since Feb. 1: 23 Metrorail sta- tions and 11 bus lines. She’s ridden buses everywhere from Oxon Hill to Georgetown to H Street NE. She has 63 Metrorail stations and near- ly 200 bus lines left to go. She records her travels on her
blog, Metro-Venture. “Oh, 80,” Hall, a onetime im- provisational comic, wrote recently
VIRGINIA SQUARE METRO STATION’S STATURE
“I don’t mean to mock Virginia Square unnecessarily, but one visit there and
you’ll see that the Arlington Government is really stretching it when they call this area a village or any sort of hub.”
of the North Capitol Street bus line. “Why do you torture me so?” And then there’s “my beloved
38B” between Ballston and Farra- gut Square: “Take a healthy serving of those who cannot or will not take the train, throw in a dash of chic Georgetown shopper, add a
BUS LINE 80’S MEDICAL TRACK
“I also have been known to call it ‘the sick bus’ because it goes by the VA Hospital, Washington Hospital Center and two Kaiser Permanente facilities.”
splash of regular commuters and you get the ingredients for this bus line.”
Sterile Metrorail stations draw a
rebuke. The Mount Vernon Square/7th St-Convention Center
metro continued on C3
TRACY A. WOODWARD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Said Em Hall: “You can be mad at Metro all the time — that’s easy — or you can have fun with it . . . and provide useful information.”
EASY SAILING ON THE NATIONAL HARBOR LINE
“It’s an efficient trip that gets you to your destination with little fanfare or fuss.”
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