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‘A quiet day at the Kennedy Center, technically open and nearly empty’ …

… runs the Washington Post headline. I walked there last week, laboring through big heat and uphills from the Reflecting Pool (an old Garrett Park neighbor is accused of having damaged it).

I took this picture of the tarp covering the absence of DT’s name and then headed inside the massive building.

The place, says the Post, is “eerie,” and “has the air of a ghost ship” foundering on the thin river off its balcony.

When I entered, a gray haired woman, moored at the information booth, looked rather embarrassed — aware of her absurdity.

A runner stopped in, briefly, to cool off in the air conditioning and headed back outside. A video of the National Symphony Orchestra played to a theater of vacant seats.

A theater of vacant seats is nice.

”Welcome to the Kennedy Center” a staffer said to me when I got to the second level. No one else was there.

The halls were alive with the sound of nothing. UD tried filling it with a memory of her last time there, which featured the impossibly high soprano of Erin Morley – but even Morley’s voice couldn’t stand up to the present pianississimo.

Certes, the KC has never been a warm burbling human scale sort of place, and UD should know cuz she’s been attending performances there since 1971; but its lobbies have always hummed with perfumed theater-goers, and its performance spaces with passion. It was impossible to miss the caesura, the jarring way everything was suddenly set at pause.

***********

UD thanks Bill, a reader, for correcting her on the date when she began going to the KC.

Margaret Soltan, July 8, 2026 5:17AM
Posted in: UD/DC

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2 Responses to “‘A quiet day at the Kennedy Center, technically open and nearly empty’ …”

  1. Bill Harshaw Says:

    Since 1962? Only in your dreams,IIRC the project was renamed for JFK after his assassination but the building didn’t open until late in the 60’s, after I moved to DC in 1968.

    🙂
    I’ve followed your blog for a long while but my first comment. Can’t resist an opportunity to nitpick.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Bill – Right you are. I must have decided to date my attendance there from when my parents moved to Bethesda. It opened in 1971. Thanks for the correction.

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