friday, june 4, 2010
BOOK WORLD
A comeuppance
for chick lit
In Hilary Thayer Hamann’s exhaustive yet intriguing novel, a young woman looks for love in (almost) all the wrong places. C3
Style
ABCDE
C
S
THEATER REVIEW
Judge for yourself
Laurence Fishburne approaches the bench mark in the one-man show “Thurgood.” C3
GALLERIES
Caricature builders
Hyper-realism hits you over the head, sometimes too hard. C8
TV PREVIEW
‘Brothers’ of invention
On HBO, Casey and Van Neistat share their small “adventures.” C3
CAROLYN HAX
Chef’s wife is stewing
? She’s bitter about the
3@washingtonpost.com/style Online discussion: From friendships to romantic relationships, Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax answers your questions. Noon
trappings of his success. C8
“It is important to understand that we can’t be here to play it safe.”
Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
After the game, Nats pitching ace is no player
W
ashington has Stephen Strasburg mania, poised to reach fever pitch Tuesday night when the rookie pitcher makes his debut at Nationals Park. But fans hoping to glimpse the $15million man out on the town — flashing a black Amex card, hanging with his posse at the latest hip bar — are out of luck. Not gonna happen. Off the field, Strasburg is a shy,
low-key homebody devoted to his bride of six months, Rachel. The newlyweds, both just 21, have deliberately kept out of the public eye by staying at hotels under assumed names and steering clear of reporters and photographers. But she has been at his side every step of his rise from college phenom to major league sensation. “She’s my best friend,” Strasburg told our colleague Dave Sheinin. “I can’t imagine her not being here.” The former Rachel Lackey, a high school water polo player, was Strasburg’s college sweetheart at San Diego State and accompanied him when he was introduced at Nationals Park last
source continued on C2
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
FACE OF THE FUTURE?Michele Bachmann, a second-term Republican congresswoman, has captured the attention of party elites around the country.
Michele Bachmann is cool to mainstream media, and an increasingly hot property
by Michael Leahy
Firebrand recognition
H
er tone was bright. “Thank you for giv- ing me this opportunity,” she said. Michele Bachmann was on the phone. That alone was unusual. The Minnesota congresswoman generally does not speak to journalists doing stories about her, at least not to journalists from what she re- fers to as the “mainstream media.” She and her communications director had granted a brief in- terview on the condition there would be no ques- tions about her reelection race. She began by spending a few minutes reflecting on what she re- garded as her key accomplishments. “What I hear from my people back home is,
‘Thank you for speaking up,’ ” she said. No other House member in recent memory has risen so swiftly on the basis of speaking up. Al- though only in her second term, the Republican Bachmann is already better known than many
senators in her party, widely popular with conser- vatives and “tea party” supporters. She has la- beled the Obama administration a “gangster gov- ernment” and expressed concerns that the presi- dent might harbor “un-American” views. At once revered and reviled, she is a talk-show producer’s dream, a fundraising juggernaut. Along with a few firebrand conservatives including Florida Re- publican senatorial hopeful Marco Rubio, she has built a large army of small donors. Now she voiced frustration with what she re- garded as the “media’s focus” on her “language.” She listened to a question about comments she had made regarding a federal program designed to expand the national number of community vol- unteers, a measure authored by the late Mas- sachusetts senator and liberal lion Edward Ken- nedy and signed into law by President Obama. She was asked about her charge that the program would lead to political “reeducation camps” for
bachmann continued on C7
Chefs fill a tall order: School lunch
Culinary stars join first lady to fight childhood obesity, starting in cafeterias
by Jane Black
It was nearly midnight on a bitter Jan-
THE KITCHEN CABINET:
Washington restaurateurs, clockwise from top left, José Andrés, Spike Mendelsohn, Robert Wiedmaier and Todd Gray have each adopted a school to help improve students’ meals.
uary night when a group of Washing- ton’s most celebrated chefs assembled around a long table at downtown hot- spot Brasserie Beck to debrief one an- other on their recent White House mis- sion. Enlisted by the first lady’s office in her war against childhood obesity, each had eaten lunch at a D.C. public school. The unanimous verdict was fairly pre- dictable: no stars. The food, largely paid for by the feder- al government, was fatty and overpro-
cessed. A breakfast sandwich had more than 100 ingredients, said one chef, an- grily waving a photo of what looked like a burrito that he’d taken on his cell- phone. Where there were salads, the kids just threw them away, bemoaned another. In one school, a chef reported, there was no cafeteria at all. The kids ate out of pizza boxes at a folding table. “What we are feeding our children is
an outrage. We should be marching with picket signs and pitchforks in revolu- tion,” said Cathal Armstrong of Restau- rant Eve in Alexandria.
But a wholesale replacement of chick-
en nuggets and nachos is a tall order. Whatever the chefs think, the meals served in schools do meet federal nutri- tion standards — and they are delivered at a price the government is willing to pay. So the city’s Iron Chefs — the group includes White House assistant chef
Sam Kass, José Andrés of Jaleo, Todd Gray of Equinox, Spike Mendelsohn of Good Stuff Eatery and Robert Wied- maier of Brasserie Beck — decided that each chef would adopt a school. Kass is spearheading the project. In the months since that meeting, the
chefs have taken the first steps to make real the lofty goals of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, which aims to end childhood obesity within a generation. Gray and Mendelsohn began teaching cooking classes to hundreds of students and parents, and have helped to plant school gardens. Armstrong established a nonprofit catering service with a mis- sion to create healthful, affordable food for public school cafeterias. On Friday, they and hundreds of other chefs will gather at the White House to
chefs continued on C2
SCORE!Stephen and Rachel Strasburg, who wed in January, at Nationals Park last August.
WASHINGTON POST
RICHARD A. LIPSKI/THE
THE RELIABLE SOURCE
A note to
comics readers
On Monday, The Post introduces “Barney & Clyde,” a comic strip about an accidental friendship between a billionaire and a homeless man. It was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning Post columnist Gene Weingarten, who cannot draw; his son, Dan Weingarten, who also cannot draw; and David Clark, who, fortunately, can.
“Barney & Clyde” is trenchant sociopolitical satire, examining our polarized society of haves and have-nots. It would probably win the Nobel Prizes in economics and literature, if it weren’t for all the underpants jokes.
It will be running daily and Sundays, in print and online. For more on the strip, check out the Q&A with Gene on the Comics Riffs blog at
washingtonpost.com/comicriffs.
“Barney & Clyde’s” entrance knocks the beloved “Cul de Sac” off the daily comics pages. But rest assured, Otterloop fans, the landing will be a soft one: Page 3, next to “Doonesbury,” in living color.
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