C2


Chef in a stew Maybe “Top Chef” was the wrong kind


of TV show for Timothy Dean. These days, the D.C.-bred restaurateur seems better suited for a legal drama. Last July, Dean filed suit against developers at National Harbor, who he alleges short-changed him on a $600,000 investment. That case is still pending. Last weekend Prime, the former cooking show contender’s


Baltimore-based steakhouse, popped up on a foreclosure auction list. According to Jimmy Bell, one of Dean’s attorneys, the sale isn’t going to happen. “Tim Dean has talked to his banks, he’s filing for Chapter 11,” says Bell. “This will give his businesses an opportunity to regroup.” Bell says Dean will bounce back. “It’s nothing different than Donald Trump has done. And Trump is still on top.”


S


KLMNO NAMES & FACES


Aniston stalker restrained A Los Angeles court has granted Jennifer Aniston a restraining order against a man who allegedly traveled from Pennsylvania hoping to get some face time with the actress. Court filings say the man, Jason R.


Peyton, was found with a roll of duct tape, a sharp object, and love letters addressed to the actress. The court granted Aniston a


temporary restraining order on July 20 after police first detained Peyton, but now it’s set in stone — he’ll have to stay away from Aniston and refrain from contacting her for the next three years.


Portia changes name To DeGeneres, naturally. After two years of marriage to talk-show host and former “American Idol” judge Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi is finally


switching over to her spouse’s surname. In a petition filed Friday the actress,


37, asked a Los Angeles court to legally change her name to Portia Lee James DeGeneres, People reports.


End Notes Sighted: Los Angeles Lakers shooting


guard Kobe Bryant and former Washington Wizard LaRon Profit at the W hotel’s P.O.V. rooftop bar Sunday night. Bryant, in town to shoot hoops with the president, came in alone for a couple of drinks and a bite to eat. Profit dined separately with some friends. — Aaron Leitko, from staff, Web and wire reports


The Reliable Source is on vacation. The column will return on Aug. 23.


MAKING IT LEGAL: Timothy Dean, left, is filing for Chapter 11; Jennifer Aniston gets a restraining order; Portia de Rossi takes Ellen DeGeneres’s last name.


TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2010


BOOK WORLD


A mother and son’s unbridgeable divide


by Bob Thompson


year-old Arvid Jansen, finds himself up a tree. Perched on a branch of an old pine overhang- ing his family’s summer house, Arvid mulls a scheme for bridg- ing the emotional gap that di- vides him from his mother. It’s not going to work, this scheme, but never mind. Pet- terson, a best-selling Norwegian writer whose “Out Stealing Horses” made him an interna- tional name in 2007, is a master at putting parents and children up the kind of psychic trees from which — minds fogged by anger and longing — they can’t climb down. The stubborn mysteries of family conflict are his subject, and he evokes them in a voice whose straightforwardness be- lies its subtlety. Six pages into “I Curse the River of Time,” Arvid de- scribes a scene he did not witness: his mother boarding a ferry from Norway to Denmark, alone, hours after learning she has stomach can- cer. She’s heading straight for that summer house in the Danish town she still con- siders home, despite decades of exile in Oslo. “Perhaps [the crew] noticed a


T


new gravity in her manner, in her walk, in the way she looked around her, as she often would with a smile on her lips that was not a smile as there was nothing to smile about that anyone could see, but it was how she looked when her mind was somewhere else,” her son observes. “As a small boy I often sat watching her when she was not aware I was in the room or perhaps had forgotten I was there, and that could make me feel lonely and abandoned. But it was exciting, too, for she looked like a woman in a film on TV, like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina lost in thought at the ship’s bow.... Or she might look like Ingrid Berg- man in Casablanca [except that] my mother would never have said: You have to think for both of us to Humphrey Bogart. Not to anyone.” Not to Arvid’s father, the un- wanted husband with whom she has a longstanding truce, and certainly not to Arvid. “He’s thir- ty-seven years old,” she tells a friend, “but I wouldn’t call him a grown-up. That would be an ex- aggeration. He’s getting a di- vorce. I don’t know what to do with him.” Hearing that his mother has fled, Arvid impulsively follows. His attempts to force her atten- tion in his direction are at once comic, pathetic and heartbreak- ing. “Oh, Arvid,” she says after one especially self-absorbed as- sault, “drop it.”


wo-thirds of the way through Per Petterson’s new novel, its narrator, 37-


I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME By Per Petterson Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund Graywolf. 233 pp. $23


The mother-son struggle con- tinues as flashbacks illuminate their history. Here they are in the 1970s, meeting for coffee af- ter her shift at the Freia choco- late factory. He tells her he’s leaving college to take up facto- ry work because the Communist Party has urged its members to become industrial workers. Blind to the likely response of the family intellectual, an obses- sive reader denied her own chance at higher education, he is stunned when she slaps his face. Here she is ringing his door- bell, seeking a reconciliation that may have been put off too long. Here he is at her 50th birthday party, too drunk to de- liver a speech in her honor. Here they are in a chillingly intimate hospital scene, watching Arvid’s brother die, still unable to cross what Arvid calls the “Rio Grande” that separates them. “I Curse the River of Time” is about much more than a mother and son. Ar- vid recalls the origins of his marriage and “how impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust.” With divorce inevi-


table, he takes reality-evading drives with his daughters, drumming on the steering wheel as they harmonize on Beatles songs. He feels time “run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks,” always leaving him “a different person than I had been before, and it sometimes made me despair.” Time erodes not just his mar- riage but his naive idealism: The portrait of Chairman Mao comes off his wall, though the book takes its title from a line of Mao’s poetry. To his mother, time seems


even less forgiving. “I thought I had no choice. But I did,” she says of the decision that drove her from home 40 years before, “and now I am ill.” Petterson’s pacing depends more on character than plot, and when it occasionally slows, the cause is not hard to deter- mine. Arvid Jansen — who is not Per Petterson, yet who comes close enough that his creator has described him as a soul mate — is simply less compelling when his tough, complicated parent is offstage. She, too, has a great deal of the autobiographical about her, and she so fascinates Petterson that he wrote an earlier novel from her point of view. The first- person voice in “To Siberia” sounds remarkably different from Arvid’s. But to readers still wondering why his mother drove him up that tree, it may come as a revelation.


bookworld@washpost.com


Thompson is a Washington writer and former Post reporter and editor.


DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau


Arena’s reopening will see Phylicia Rashad by Peter Marks


A Tony-winning actress will team with a heat-drawing Broad- way director this fall in one of the inaugural productions of Arena Stage’s first season back on its Southwest Washington campus after a $125 million makeover. Phylicia Rashad, the onetime “Cosby Show” star who won a Tony in the 2004 Broadway reviv- al of “A Raisin in the Sun,” has been cast in Arena’s world-pre- miere offering of Marcus Gar- dley’s “Every Tongue Confess.” The nine-actor play, set in the American South in the 1990s dur- ing a spate of church burnings, will be the christening produc- tion in Arena’s newly added third stage, the 200-seat Kogod Cradle,


a space that is expected to be de- voted largely to new American plays. “It’s a mountain of a role, and I


can’t think of anyone better than Phylicia to tackle it,” said Arena Artistic Director Molly Smith. Directing “Every Tongue Con- fess” will be Kenny Leon, who oversaw the Kennedy Center’s marathon staged readings of the plays of August Wilson and more recently directed Denzel Wash- ington and Viola Davis in the hit Broadway revival of “Fences.” The announcement Tuesday of the participation of Rashad — who last performed at Arena a decade ago in Charles Randolph- Wright’s “Blue” — attaches an- other well-known name to the events surrounding the reopen- ing. Last week, Arena officials an-


nounced that President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will serve as honorary chairs of the company’s first season back in Southwest after two seasons of staging shows at the Lincoln Theatre on U Street NW and in a space in Crystal City. “Every Tongue Confess,” which begins performances on Nov. 9, is one of three high-profile works that will open Arena’s trio of thea- ters from October through De- cember. The Cradle has been add- ed to Arena’s existing stages, the Fichandler and the Kreeger, both of which have been extensively renovated during the 21


⁄2 -year


construction project. Vancouver architect Bing Thom designed a soaring glass enclosure over Are- na’s campus at Sixth Street and Maine Avenue SW and linked the


ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM To see images of the newly built


Arena Stage complex in Southwest Washington, visit washingtonpost. com/style.


Safety concerns loom large on rigs safety from C1


accidents on rigs and platforms were reported from 2006 through 2009 in the gulf, as well as 30 deaths. The accident statis- tics are significantly higher than in the five years before 2006, when a new definition of “acci- dent” went into effect. In the five years before 2006, MMS logged a total of 252 gulf accidents and 30 deaths. “It’s clear to me there are a number of things that can be done to enhance safety,” the new BOE director, Michael Brom- wich, said in an interview. The accident reports tell him the in- dustry’s safety program “wasn’t as strong as it should have been.” At many sites, company


spokesmen say, safety is a top priority and men get detailed training. For instance, Noble Corp. spokesman John Breed said that its crews are instructed for six months on the rigs before they’re ready for work. He said the jobs are highly paid and in great demand. Some regulators fear, however, that the federally required training is bare-bones, and they have pushed in recent years for the power to audit com- pany training plans. On many rigs, with the weath-


er often harsh, the work danger- ous and the shifts sometimes lasting 12 hours or more — acci- dents are a constant worry. Many believe the actual number is con- siderably higher than reported. Frank Spagnoletti, a Houston


lawyer who has represented many rig workers, said clients were often injured in accidents that either the rig operator chose not to report to regulators or that MMS inspectors knew about but decided not to investigate. Spag- noletti said the chumminess of the regulators with industry op- erators is well-known on the Gulf Coast, adding that the agency’s tepid accident reports and rare, meager fines leave workers un- protected. Gary Arsenault, a Louisiana personal injury lawyer who has sued oil companies on behalf of workers, said the most common


SEAN GARDNER/REUTERS


HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT: A welder’s job isn’t easy under any circumstances, but bad weather and long hours compound the peril.


rig denizen is a burly high school dropout. “They’re hiring these guys for their bodies, and when they get hurt, the company throws them away,” Arsenault said. “You have a bunch of people out there who are green and don’t know what they’re doing. They’re working 12 on and 12 off, sometimes 18s, sometimes 24s. Accidents happen, and it’s the ul- timately the almighty dollar that drives it all.”


One of his clients was Garold


Bates, a contractor who was in- jured in January 2004. He had been sent to an Energy Partners oil rig to unload supplies, but found crashing waves were ram- ming his boat up against the platform pilings like a toy. A co- worker warned the company foreman back on the coast by ra- dio that unloading the supplies was not a good idea due to the rough seas. The foreman ordered the pair to “go ahead and put it on there.” Bates’s leg was crushed


between the platform and the boat, requiring emergency med- ical treatment and subsequent therapy for his injuries. “The man that told [us] to do it, he wasn’t there,” Bates said in his deposition. “There probably wasn’t any seas kicking up where he was at on the land.” The incident was never report- ed to the MMS; an Energy Part- ners spokesperson said it is not necessary to report incidents that are initially classified as a “first aid” problem. Lawyers said companies often avoid reporting accidents to win bonuses and fu- ture work because of their clean safety records. Bates’s injury law- suit ended with a judge mediat- ing a settlement in which the company paid Bates an undis- closed sum and admitted no fault. Lee Hunt, director of the Inter-


national Association of Drilling Contractors, says the view of rigs as unsafe and exploitative is “a total fabrication, a kind of dream


CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson


scenario for an injury lawyer. “Crews offshore are well fed, well housed, well paid, and very proud to be working the rigs,” he said. “These are incredibly well trained crews, and to say they’re treated so badly is terribly offen- sive.” As the rigs become increasing- ly sophisticated and computer- guided, he said, the need for well educated, experienced and high- ly paid professionals has grown. An entry-level roustabout or maintenance worker will make $50,000 to $60,000 a year, and professionals substantially more. A former senior MMS supervi- sor said that in 2007 and 2008, a handful of senior managers in the agency pushed the MMS Of- fice of Safety Management to au- tomatically fine operators when a worker was killed in an acci- dent on its rigs or platforms. But “that ran right into the culture, a lot of opposition,” said the super- visor, who was familiar with the effort. “It was like pushing Jell-O up-


hill.” The issue of worker safety is


playing a role in the follow-up to the BP Deepwater Horizon blow- out. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) championed a bill that would prevent companies from firing employees who report safety vio- lations and allows whistle- blowers to appeal perceived re- taliation to the Secretary of La- bor. “We have heard that the work- ers aboard the [Deepwater Hori- zon] rig had safety concerns, but in the end they were powerless to stop the cascading string of bad decisions by BP that led to the disaster,” Markey said during de- bate. The bill passed the House by a vote of 315-93 and was incor- porated into a larger energy bill that passed the House on a far closer vote. The legislation, however, stalled in the Senate. leonnigc@washpost.com kaufmanm@washpost.com


Staff writer Juliet Eilperin and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this story.


three theaters in a multilevel net- work of lobbies, bars and cafes. In Arena’s largest space, the in- the-round Fichandler Stage, the season begins Oct. 22 with a mul- tiethnic cast in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “Okla- homa!” The Kreeger Theater’s program begins on the last day of the year with “Let Me Down Easy,” Anna Deavere Smith’s wide-ranging solo show, which commences a national tour with its six-week stay at Arena.


marksp@washpost.com


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