March 2007 |
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A race and a reunion in Miami
After 40 years Joy meets her "first mother"
| Photo courtesy of www.asiphoto.com |  |
| Joy and Kate Austin-Lane cross the finish line. | While writing a doctoral dissertation you must rid yourself of stray thoughts.
Joy Austin-Lane, the Ward One rep on the City Council, stored hers in a special file folder on her computer. Sitting at her keyboard, tapping in data for her thesis about political variables that influenced how states spent their share of the federal tobacco settlement, she would conscientiously make notes of extraneous ideas and then get back to her data.
After a while, amidst all the reminders to herself about her romping daughter Kate and the points of governance for her constituents, Joy began to notice versions of a question that kept repeating — "I wonder what it'd be like to meet her?" — and she came to realize how close to the surface was her desire to find a mother she had never seen, whose name she did not know, who, at age 20, a college student, unmarried, not well off, a refugee from polite society living at St. Vincent's Home for Girls in Miami, had cut all strings to her newborn baby.
"I'd known all my life I was adopted, and that had never bothered me. My mom and dad, the two people who raised me, they're both wonderful," Joy says. "But I had always wondered, 'What was my birth mother like?'"
Life and politics kept the question at bay a few more years. Joy had a second child with her husband Chris, entered the race for a District 20 seat in the Maryland legislature, completed her PhD in Public Health, switched to the Montgomery County Council District Five race, withdrew and joined the brain trust of Valerie Ervin's winning District Five campaign, and last summer took an out-of-the-house careerist job as an analyst at the Falls Church office of SRA International, a federal contractor for public health.
On the occasion of Joy's fortieth birthday in August the time finally seemed right. Within a few days she sought and received the blessing of her parents, retired in Orlando ("They couldn't have been nicer. They said, 'We're curious, too!'), and she set in motion the process of discovery through Children's Home Society, the agency that had handled her adoption.
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| Chris and Joy Austin-Lane with their children. |
On New Year's Day, talking to her husband, Joy said her resolution for 2007 was to meet the woman who had given her birth. She laughed and quickly made a second resolution, to run her first marathon. The second was not meant to dilute the first, but when the two events were later set for the same day, one in the morning, one in the evening, Joy felt less nervous.
The 26-mile run would occupy a big block of hours leading up to the reunion. She would push her lungs and legs to their limit, take a shower, dress up her kids and try to stop guessing how something that had played in her mind for so long would play out in reality.
Joy had written a letter for an adoption officer to pass on to her mother. "While working on my graduate degree in Public Health, I decided that my curiosity about you would not go away," the letter said. ("I gave her a very brief, factual overview of my life.")
Suzanne Weston, still living in Miami, her identity still unrevealed to Joy, had read this spare, efficient missive. She had not sent a reply.
On January 22, after several weeks of anxious waiting at the Austin-Lane home on Tulip Avenue, a manila envelop arrived in the mailbox. Suzanne had crafted a diary of her reactions, poetic words in precise lettering drawn by hand and punctuated by ellipses. "I wondered if you might one day search for me and never gave up hope that you would. However, I was not prepared for my own emotional response," one of the entries began.
 | | Suzanne Weston with her daughter and granddaughter. | "I was your first mother and now I am your birth mother," Suzanne wrote on another day.
And on another: "I was your mother. I gave you away. It broke my heart."
Joy is recalling how the pages trembled in her hands as she read them. Her eyes are champagne-bright. She says, "I pretty much bawled all day long. I was struck by how important this was to me, even though I had never wanted it to be important."
Six days later, in a morning rain, Joy ran the AIDS Marathon on Miami's glistening streets to raise money for the Whitman Walker Clinic. Her time was an effortful five hours, 47 minutes. Six-year-old Kate ran with her on the home stretch and across the finish line.
Around suppertime, in an oasis of plump chairs and potted palms at the Hyatt Regency, Joy and Suzanne greeted each other in an equal trade of anxiety. No literary romance had to be supplied. The mission that had begun as curiosity now was a rush of pounding hearts.
"We talked and ate a meal at the Capital Grille around the corner, came back to the hotel, had dessert, took photographs and talked some more, until the kids got too restless. She told me all about herself. She is very creative and has a lovely way of speaking. She never married, though she's still hoping her soul mate will find her. I'm her only child. She and I went to the same high school. We might've had some of the same teachers. For a while, when I was a growing up, she was living close by, within spitting distance. Of course, neither of us knew it."
Joy has continued to stay in touch with her.
Robberies six & seven: Same as previous five?
In the first five of the stickups that since December have spooked the shop keepers in Old Takoma the robbers operated as if they had standardized the crime, always two of them, with guns, ski masks and gloves, often in daylight, leading police to believe they were the same men.
At 2:45 p.m. on Friday, February 16, a sixth robbery occurred. A ski-masked, gloved man, openly holding a gun, held up Action Tech Services at 7316 Carroll Avenue in the Junction. Except that the robber had no accomplice, the robbery itself was similar to the first five.
The familiar brazen confidence: the same part of town, in the middle of a business day. He had to step systematically to and from his car; the curb was packed with frozen snow after the February storms. He took time inside the store to order the owner to empty the cash register, extend his hand for the receipts, order the owner and a customer to stretch out on the floor, and extract wallets from their pockets.
As police tried to determine whether the man was a copycat, or one of the original pair, a seventh robbery occurred two weeks later, at 2:51 p.m. on Friday, March 2, in the same block. Two men held up the Takoma Business Center at 7304 Carroll Avenue. They were armed, one with a "chrome silver large-frame revolver," but these men wore large frame sunglasses rather than ski masks, and their faces were caught on the store's surveillance camera. Click here to see images from the surveillance videos.
A copy of the video footage, in MPEG or JPEG, is available from Takoma Park Detective Richard Cannatella (301-891-7145 or 301-270-1100). He is also the point man for tips.
The descriptions of the two men in the last stickup seem to match generally with the first five robberies: "Suspect #1, a black male, mid 20's, 5'10"-6'0", wearing a dark hooded shirt, blue knit cap. Suspect #2, a black male, mid 20's, thin build, wearing a dark hooded shirt with a multi print metallic design on the front."
The solitary robber is described as "an adult male, 5'9" tall, 195 lbs, medium build and wearing a tan jacket, a dark blue ski mask and black gloves."
Hospital may move to White Oak,
but "urgent care" may stay here
The likelihood that Washington Adventist Hospital will be rebuilt as a big, modern facility outside Takoma Park came a little closer to reality in February when Montgomery County purchased a large parcel of land, colloquially called "the old sludge dump," near the Food and Drug Administration site in White Oak. It is a location that hospital officials have been eyeing favorably for more than a year.
At the same time it seems more likely that the hospital will retain a significant presence - perhaps a new 24-hour "urgent care" facility -- on their historic 13-acre campus at Carroll and Flower Avenues.
The hospital board previously purchased rights to a strip of commercial property fronting on Flower Avenue, near Piney Branch Road, for medical offices and a 24-hour facility, but neighbors there objected to the noise and traffic from middle-of-the-night medical treatment. Instead hospital officials are now looking at the merits of converting the outdated ER at Carroll and Flower into one that treats patients needing "urgent care," all emergencies except life-threatening ones.
The move to White Oak will be tentative until state authorities decide whether the area is already well served by three nearby hospitals, Laurel, Holy Cross and Montgomery General. In that is the case hospital officials might consider moving their main operations a much shorter distance, to the corner of Carroll Avenue and University Boulevard, the site of an Adventist elementary school and high school.
"Everyone agrees the current campus is too small for a big expansion, but I would like to see important medical functions stay where they are right now. That's why a dual campus makes sense," says County Council member Marc Elrich, who lives a block from the hospital.
The question of the hospital's future has registered with new County Executive Ike Leggett who told Marc he may authorize a study of the various plans, which could keep them on hold for several more months.
Local girl invited to center row on Oscar night
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| Rachel Grady |
Rachel Grady, a Manhattan filmmaker in her 20's who until a few weeks ago had not yet done Hollywood, is the daughter of local novelist and screenwriter Jim Grady and former TV producer Bonnie Goldstein, although dad and mom may no longer bear mentioning in future articles about Rachel.
Rachel teamed up with Heidi Ewing, of the same age and aspirations, to produce the documentary, Jesus Camp, about a North Dakota evangelical fanatic who ran a Bible school where third-graders spoke in tongues and knelt reverently at a cardboard cut-out of President Bush. Last year, in the Silverdocs competition at AFI, their film won a grand jury award, and this year there was a rumor they might be nominated for an Oscar.
Rachel and Heidi were to fly to Santa Barbara for a screening on January 23, the day of the Oscar announcements. Friends thought they should stay home and wait for a call from the Academy, but Rachel and Heidi thought this might jinx them.
Once on the plane, though, the long flight seemed too long to wait out the suspense. They asked a flight attendant to give a note to the captain imploring him to check the Oscar.com web site. About an hour later, with amused drama, he informed the entire cabin, "I have an important announcement to make. The two women in row 23 have just become Oscar nominees." Other passengers clapped in surprise. The two women hugged and high-fived and spent the rest of the flight drinking champagne courtesy of the captain.
For the next month Rachel and Heidi hit the Hollywood dives, had lunch with Eddie Murphy and met Igor "the Oscar Angel" who gave them the run of the Gaultier showroom to find outfits for Oscar night, an adventure they chronicled on www.tribecafilmfestival.org/oscar-diary.htm.
On February 28 they lost to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and then returned to New York City where they posted a final entry on their Hollywood blog. "We had a fantastic, surreal, and hilarious month. And now it's over. The next day at LAX we couldn't even get a table at Chili's, and we had to give all our dresses and jewels back."
Meanwhile, the Bible school, which Time magazine said was perpetrating "a crime - the theft of childhood," closed last November, the result, the school director said, "of negative reaction due to the film."
Old Taliano's an exhibit hall
but when will it be a brew-pub?
The teaser Sam Kittner e-mailed about his photo display at the old Taliano's in Old Takoma was a reminder that the place has been sitting empty for almost a year. "Wish I was telling you that a new, great brew-pub or restaurant was opening this week," he wrote. "Hopefully we'll soon we'll hear something like that."
In the meantime Sam's candid shots of Takoma Park kids - he calls them "real" portraits - are arrestingly taped to the large plate glass window of the former pizzeria and beer joint. This is part of "Main Street" director Roz Grigsby's attempt to spiff up vacant storefronts.
Sam, whose studio is down the street at 7056 Carroll Avenue, also put up a couple shots of Sligo Creek taken with a panoramic technique that gives the humble stream a kind of enigmatic grandeur.
As for when a pub or eatery might replace Taliano's, the stated goal of the new owners, there is no progress to report.
CUC may lose president
Prospects for Columbia Union College seemed bright last summer after the governing board decided to expand the small Adventist school rather than sell off land to settle a $7 million debt, but now the college's dynamic president, Randal Wisbey, is weighing an offer to take the presidency of La Sierra University, a larger Adventist school in Riverside, California.
Before making a decision Mr. Wisbey said he will first visit La Sierra. The offer came in a phone call on February 15.
Comings & Goings
• Bill Richardson is the first of the 2008 presidential candidates to visit Takoma Park. He was amiable and entertaining at an eat-and-greet hosted by Heather Mizeur on February 25 and won applause when he declared he would cease and desist with 50 percent of all oil imports and replace them with "alternative fuels" within 10 years, "just like John Kennedy did when he said we'd get to the moon in 10 years."
Heather, a former aide to U. S. Senator John Kerry and now a Disrict 20 delegate, says she is neutral thus far in the 2008 Democratic primaries and expects to throw local parties for Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
 | | Steve Barber, two-time Oriole all-star. |
• Michelle Harvey, the longtime time PTA activist and Takoma Soccer coach, is leaving town for Bentonville, Arkansas, where she will be Environmental Defense's liaison to Wal-Mart. As envisioned by Michelle and her colleagues, this working alliance between their non-profit eco group and one of the country's biggest corporations will lead to shocking changes at Wal-Mart. "We're talking about a broad, ambitious goal. For Wal-Mart to be supplied by 100 percent renewable energy, to sell sustainable products, and to reduce waste to zero," she says. Michelle's son Cas will go with her this summer, and her husband Don, two years from federal retirement, will follow as soon as he can.
Steve Barber: Native son and O's great
Steve Barber, 68, a Takoma Park native and a Blair High graduate who was the first 20-game winner in modern Baltimore Orioles history, died of complications of pneumonia on February 4 in Nevada.
Mr. Barber was a two-time all-star and was with the Orioles when they won the World Series in 1966. He combined on a no-hitter, with relief from Stu Miller, against the Detroit Tigers in 1967, though the game was lost due to a series of walks and errors.
He finished out his baseball career with other teams but later was inducted into the Maryland Athletic Hall of Fame.
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