Washington City Paper: Contents for Jan. 6

Visible Man
Can Marion Barry survive salvation?

Cover Story

When he hit the microphone Monday afternoon, Marion Barry did a most un-Barrylike thing. Not that he was downbeat, or dull. He rounded up the usual notes—his good fortune, God's grace, youth, age, violence, drugs, money, change, hope, responsibility—but also admitted feeling nervous. With his suit and his tie and his unsmirking acknowledgment of anxiety, the Mayor-for-Life suggested a scientist who has landed the big grant—except that now he has to cure cancer.

Marion Barry has been a politician for so long that the salient goal of his early life is understandably obscure. But that goal—a doctorate in chemistry—helps explain the man who has become D.C.'s mayor for the fourth time.

What do chemists do? They tinker with known compounds and combine elements in innovative arrangements to produce surprising solutions. They trigger reactions, sometimes benign, sometimes violent, to achieve heretofore undiscovered aims. One experiment may unleash chaos; another may impose order.

In the social laboratory that is Washington, D.C., Marion Barry is the politician as chemist: a relentless experimenter, a user of tried and true formulae, ever ready to enhance the efficacy of old admixtures, always prepared to abandon that which obviously no longer works for that which might.... Continued

Issue of Jan. 6 - 12, 1995

News and Features

Visible Man
Can Marion Barry survive salvation?
Cover Story By Michael Dolan
Adieu to the District
A Catalog of the Things I'll Miss--and the Things I Won't
Feature By Alan Bisbort
True Grits
Wild West Covers Cowpokes, Gunslingers, and Indian Chiefs—From an Office Deep in the Heart of Northern Virginia
The City By Eddie Dean
Ball Breaker
The City By Clara Jeffery
Praise the Chiefs, Pass the Tomahawk
The City By Eddie Dean
Tales From the Crypt
How to Get Buried in Washington National Cathedral
The City By David Plotz
Too Unpleasant
The Mail By Marilyn Larson
I Have a Zone to Pick With You
The Mail By Bob Guldin
Danger: Will Robinson
The Mail By William L. Robinson
Put It Here
The Mail By J. Brendan Meyer
Smells Like Teen Spirit
The Mail By Mike Kanin
Bobbing for Reviews
The Mail By Alex Bergheim
Back Talk
The Mail By Ned Reif
Recycled Junk
The Mail By Henry Cohen
Getting Over the Airwaves
The Mail By Sam Smith
Take Him Out to the Ball Game
The Mail By Martin Morse Wooster