All day Saturday, the Duke Ellington School will also be hosting the Holiday Gift and Bazaar Show, a market full of jewelry, food, and other Christmas goodies.

Put on by the school’s Home Association, this bazaar is the perfect destination to find some stocking stuffers (or stomach stuffers), and it’s all within a nice walking distance from campus.  The bazaar will be open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and admission is free.

Next Thursday and Friday, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts will be throwing a soulful holiday concert. Featuring several of the school’s musical ensembles, the Motown-inspired concert will take place in the school’s Ellington Theatre  at 35th and R Street in Burleith. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $10.

It’s time to get in the Christmas spirit, and you really don’t want to miss a chance to see these child prodigies developing across the street. Seriously, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life when you learn that  the next Dizzy Gillespie blossomed out of this neighboring musical institution.

Best. Sampling. Ever.

This Thursday, the Corp will be sampling those F’Real milkshakes and smoothies that are now available at Vital Vittles. (The chocolate milkshake is delicious. We’ve had, like, 15 of them already.)

Stop by Red Square from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m to sample the available flavors, which include strawberry banana, Reese’s, and cookies and cream.

Poetry, school pride, and splendid provisions

Although you might not get the chance to paint your face, the Lannan Center still offers you the chance to show your school spirit listen to some poetry, and chow down for free.

Today, Georgetown’s own David Gewanter will have a formal reading of his work in the Copley Formal Lounge from 8 p.m. Don’t forget to stick around for the reception that follows.

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Ever since the Washington Post reported that D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s office did a cost analysis for moving the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Rhee has been inundated with phone calls and e-mails from furious parents. Now she’s moving quickly to temper their anger, saying that the District has no immediate plans to move the school out of its Georgetown/Burleith location, although it would eventually like to move it into a new building.

The Washington Post is reporting that Rhee will meet with members of the school’s governing board today, too, to try to mollify their concerns. They had been unaware of the cost analysis report. Bill Turque writes “Michaele C. Christian, president of the school’s governing board, told Rhee in a letter Wednesday that she was ‘appalled’ by the possible move, which had been considered without consulting the school community. She called the Logan site ‘woefully inadequate’ and said the move ‘would eviscerate one of the most outstanding educational institutions in the District.’”

Fears that the school would be moved into a vacant school building near Union Station weren’t helped by Rhee’s recent overthrow of the popular principal of nearby Hardy Middle School.

So for now, the Georgetown and Burleith neighborhood get to keep a beacon of artistic achievement—and Georgetown students know for sure now that their big green drunk perch is safe and sound.

Photo from CitySifting

Having already replaced the principal of Hardy Middle School in a much-criticized attempt to make the school more appealing to local families, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is eyeing the Duke Ellington School of the Arts—that’s the one on 35th Street with the big green chair—for possible conversion from an illustrious performing arts-centric high school into a public high school that would serve Ward 2 families.

Rhee and school construction czar Allen Lew say that they have no concrete plans to convert the school yet, but the Washington Post‘s Bill Turque reports that Lew’s office has developed a cost estimate for moving the Duke Ellington school into the vacant Logan Elementary School in Northeast D.C., near Union Station.

Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans (D) is also strongly in favor of the conversion, as Ward 2 is the only ward in the District that does not have a neigborhood high school.

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Kevin Bender (COL ’09) as George

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town,”a play about the little things,” as it is often described, is so ubiquitous among small theaters that one can reasonably expect any new production to be an attempt to “make it new.” The collaboration between the Georgetown University Theater and Performance Studies Program and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, which Vox saw yesterday as a open rehearsal screening, is no exception.

For their purposes, directors Sarah Marshall and Derek Goldman have thrown the cast list to the wind and distributed the parts of Our Town‘s two main characters among several different actors, who make a habit out of butting in or butting out mid-scene. Every actor plays the Stage Manager, the play’s narrator, even as they simultaneously play the milkman, the organist, or a mom.

The switcheroos are executed well enough, and there is enough continuity between actors that this doesn’t turn out to be the quite as distracting of a gimmick as it could have been. But with so many actors interpreting them, the main characters lose all their nuance and fail to develop. And for a play that’s in part about growing up and change, that’s a pretty flagrant failing.

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