And, as the lead prosecutor in the Senate trial to impeach former President Donald Trump, the Maryland Democrat feared he was about to be robbed of his country.

Raskin’s personal challenges didn’t end with Trump’s acquittal. In December, 2022, Raskin was diagnosed with cancer, but announced a year later that his chemotherapy treatment had been successful and that he is in remission.

Now, a Takoma Park-based music group has taken that extraordinary period in the congressman’s life — and the nation’s history —  and turned it into a work of art.

“The Jamie Raskin Oratorio,” a 37-minute poem with music, will receive its world premiere Saturday in Silver Spring.

The “Oratorio” is written in Raskin’s voice and at times addresses the congressman’s dead son, Tommy, directly.

“Our democracy is such a fragile, precarious, transitory thing,” the poem says.  “We could have been plunged into authoritarianism. And then I would have lost you twice. My son, my dear America.”

The “Oratorio” was commissioned by Washington Musica Viva, which has performed chamber music in small, intimate settings since 1998.

Carl Banner, the music group’s executive director said that Raskin is a beloved figure in the community — as are members of his family. Tommy’s Pantry, a thriving food program serving part of Montgomery County, is named in honor of the congressman’s son, who died Dec. 31, 2020, at age 25.

“Jamie Raskin is the congressman from our district, and he is a local hero for us,” Banner said.

Banner asked Anne Becker, the former poet laureate of Takoma Park, to write the text. She spent nine months reading newspaper interviews with the congressman, listening to his speeches on YouTube, and combing through his 2022 memoir: “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.”

After Becker finished writing the 11-section poem and before the concert had been scheduled, the group sent the manuscript to Raskin’s office.

“I am honored and touched beyond measure and also somewhat dumbfounded by the whole thing,” Raskin wrote in an email to The Sun.

His spokeswoman said that prior commitments will prevent the congressman from attending the performance at the Church of the Ascension in Silver Spring.

But Raskin added that he feels “very grateful to Anne Becker, a brilliant poet in Maryland who has apparently been a moving force behind the project” and said that he hopes “to thank everyone involved.”

The piece proceeds roughly chronologically from Dec. 31, 2020, through Trump’s acquittal on Feb. 13, 2121.(Though it isn’t mentioned in the text, Raskin’s challenges didn’t end with the trial. He was diagnosed with cancer in December, 2022, but announced a year later that chemotherapy had been successful and that his disease was in remission.)

Occasionally, Becker departs from the written record to weave in her own interpretations, most notably in the first and shortest section of the “Oratorio” which touches upon Tommy Raskin’s suicide.

Becker feared that using the congressman’s recollections of his private tragedy in a work of art would be inappropriate and intrusive.

“I couldn’t touch that,” she said. “Those memories are his.”

Instead, the poem describes a moment of stillness — almost of peace — in the period between Tommy Raskin’s death and the discovery of his body. A book lays face-down on the floor. Soft cotton clothes are jumbled in a pile. All movement ceases once the “elegant symmetry” of the body has been halted.

But Tommy Raskin remains a figure throughout the remainder of the “Oratorio” as his father carries him in his heart during the following frantic six weeks.

The second section describes Jamie Raskin’s scramble to safety with other senators caught inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and his worries about his daughter, Tabitha, who seeks refuge in a locked office.

But this section is not without occasional flashes of humor.

“Shots fired in the House,” the poem says. “Keep moving, down hallways and exit ramps at a fast trot that’s pretty impressive for middle-aged politicians.”

The final section of the poem describes Raskin’s futile hope that “righteous Republicans” will join Democrats and vote to impeach Trump.

Composer Noam Faingold said he scored the piece for piano (played by Banner) and trumpet (performed by Chris Royal) because the instruments perform different functions. The trumpet stands in for Raskin’s voice and is alternately triumphant and plaintive. Even when the sound thickens and distorts during moments of trauma, the trumpet is always in search of a melody.

The piano, in contrast, has as many voices as the community it represents, from the different members of Congress to the American people.

“When I saw Anne’s completed text,” Faingold said, “I realized my role was to highlight and underline her poem, to create a pedestal for it, to bring in what was felt but not directly seen.”

Though Saturday’s concert at the Church of the Ascension in Silver Spring is the only performance that has been scheduled, Banner said his group “hopes other interested organizations will help it to give us more life after the premiere.”

They think “The Raskin Oratorio” has an important American story to tell. In the final coda, that trumpet soars, its voice in harmony with the piano.

“Jamie could have been totally dragged down by his son’s death,” Becker said. “But he didn’t let that stop him from doing something important for his country.”

If you go

“The Raskin Oratorio” will be performed at 7 p.m. Saturday at Church of the Ascension, 633 Sligo Ave., Silver Spring. Tickets cost $20 and can be purchased at dcmusicaviva.org.

The Labor Day action could be a precursor to a more sustained work stoppage. Union leaders said the walk-out is aimed at pressuring hotel management to budge on its employees’ demands.

Some 40,000 hotel workers represented by the UNITE HERE union are renegotiating contracts this year in more than 20 cities across the U.S. and Canada.

The strike in Baltimore involves members of UNITE HERE Local 7 and follows 10 months of negotiations that so far have failed to produce an agreement. It is one of a series of walk-outs in eight other cities: Boston, Greenwich, Honolulu, Kauai, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle.

Union president Tracy Lingo said Monday that she thinks the strike has the potential to get results at the bargaining table, similar to the movement she saw from the company after workers voted Aug. 9 to authorize a strike.

“We are fighting for our economic lives,” she said. “There’s been progress on wages, but there’s still too big a gap between Baltimore and neighboring cities.”

Though Baltimore City owns the hotel, the Virginia-based Hilton Hotel chain has a contract to manage the facility at 401 W. Pratt St. Hotel workers are Hilton employees and receive their paychecks from Hilton.

Lingo said the union is trying to raise the pay for the hotel’s lowest-paid employees immediately from $16.20 an hour, or just slightly more than the $15 an hour minimum wage in Maryland, to $20 an hour. In subsequent years, the union aims to narrow the wage gap between hotel workers in Baltimore and their counterparts in nearby cities.

For instance, hotel workers in Washington recently approved a contract setting minimum pay at $29 an hour now, Lingo said, and $33 an hour before the contract expires in 2028. In Philadelphia, the minimum wage for Hilton workers is $22 an hour, she said.

A spokesperson for the hotel chain didn’t comment on the specific wage proposals, but released a statement Sunday saying: “Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor makes every effort to maintain a cooperative and productive relationship with UNITE HERE Local 7, the union that represents some of our team members. We remain committed to negotiating in good faith to reach a fair and reasonable agreements that is beneficial to both our valued team members and to our hotels.”

Mayor Brandon Scott is monitoring negotiations carefully, a spokesman for the Mayor’s Office wrote Monday in a statement, and has called for a “cooling off period” that could help the opposing sides find common ground.

The mayor is an “advocate for all of the city’s hospitality workers,” the statement said. “He deeply values their work in Baltimore and their right to fight for the best possible deal for their members.”

City Council members Zeke Cohen and James Torrence stopped by the picket line Monday to express their support for the workers, as did Democratic nominee for City Council District 11 Zac Blanchard.

The employees — baristas, servers, hosts, cooks, housekeepers, market assistants, bellmen, dishwashers and front desk agents — voted Aug. 9 to authorize a strike. The workers’ contract expired last Thursday.

The union claims that hotels took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to cut staff and suspend guest services that were never restored, such as daily hotel room cleanings, causing workers to lose jobs and income – and increasing the workload for the remaining staff.

About two dozen hotel employees picketed at noon Monday outside the hotel, down from an estimated high of nearly 200 employees, family members and supporters from other unions at 9:30 a.m., when the work stoppage began. The picketers carried signs saying, “One Job Should Be Enough,” and chanted to a drum beat pounded out on an overturned bucket by Hilton cook Rooheen Abid.

According to a union news release, more than half of the housekeeping staff reported in a recent survey that they had to use food stamps and/or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to augment their hotel paychecks. Sixty-one percent reported that they were on at least one form of public assistance, including public health insurance.

Another issue: The union wants the hotel to ends its practice of subcontracting work to temporary employees instead of providing permanent jobs for Baltimore residents.

Deja Richardson, 29, Sherrice Thompson, 37, and Bria Ramsey, 30, are all Baltimore residents and members of Hilton’s housekeeping staff. They said it wasn’t easy to go on strike and voluntarily forego a day’s wages.

But they said it was a better alternative than trying to pay their bills based on their existing salaries. They look for extra work wherever they can find it — baby-sitting, dog-walking or cutting hair.

Richardson, a mother of two young children, said that she is on publicly-funded health insurance because after paying for housing, food, transportation and diapers, she can’t afford the pricy policy offered by the hotel chain.

“We all deserve to be paid fairly and treated with respect,” Richardson said. “I feel that by doing this, maybe we’ll get a chance to be heard.”

Both sides are scheduled to return to the bargaining table Thursday.

He was caught in a firestorm of controversy this week after The New York Times reported Thursday that the governor inaccurately claimed to have received a Bronze Star in a 2006 application for a White House fellowship.

Moore has described the misstatement as “an honest mistake” made at the behest of his commanding officer after he was assured that the honor was forthcoming.

But this wasn’t the first time that critics have questioned biographical statements made by Moore, a rising star in Democratic national politics. The governor’s detractors have previously taken issue with Moore’s assertion that he is a Baltimore native, and that he was named to the Maryland Football Hall of Fame.

Instead, Moore was born in Takoma Park, spent most of his childhood in the Bronx, and didn’t have a Baltimore address until he enrolled in Johns Hopkins University in 1998 shortly before his 20th birthday. There is no such organization as the Maryland Football Hall of Fame. In reality, Moore was honored in 2002 by the Baltimore chapter of the National Football Foundation for having been named a Rhodes Scholar, according to The New York Times.

Below are five times that Moore either misstated or failed to correct the record about the Bronze Star or his childhood:

C-SPAN interview in 2006

On the 2006 fellowship application, Moore wrote that he was “named to the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame.” When that claim was repeated later that year in an Aug. 25, 2006, interview with C-SPAN host Brian Lamb, who said, “And you’re already in the Maryland Hall of Fame, is that right?” Moore laughs and nods his head, though his verbal response was inaudible.

PBS NewsHour interview in 2008

On Dec. 1, 2008, Moore appeared on the “PBS NewsHour” with Gwen Ifill, who described him this way: “He completed a combat tour of duty of Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star.” Moore did not react to the claim and did not correct Ifill.

‘The Colbert Report’ in 2010

On June 21, 2010, Stephen Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report,” introduced Moore to his Comedy Central office by summarizing his wartime experience: “You’re a decorated veteran of the Afghan War, correct?” Colbert asks. Moore responds “Yes.”

‘The Bronze Star,” Colbert asks, and the audience erupts in cheers. While Moore doesn’t respond verbally, he is seen nodding his head up and down.

Book tour interview in 2010

On May 12, 2010, Moore failed to contradict PBS broadcast veteran Judy Woodruff who interviewed him during his book tour and described him as “a Baltimore native.” Woodruff went on to summarize his book, “The Other Wes Moore,” as being about “two boys living in Baltimore with similar stories and an identical name.”

FAN interview in 2020

On July 20, 2020, Moore appeared on the Family Action Network (FAN) and described himself to interviewer Ava Thompson Greenwell as “a very, very proud Baltimore resident and Baltimore native.”

List price: $4,550,000

Year built: 2006

Real estate agent: Pamela Tierney of Coldwell Banker Realty in the Mid-Atlantic

Last sold price/date: For $2,825,000 on July 16, 2018

Property size: 9,038-square-foot home has six bedrooms plus seven full bathrooms and an attached three-car garage on 4.37 acres.

Unique features: This waterfront home overlooking the Severn River has a private pier with three boat lifts, a small sand beach and a heated salt-water swimming pool.

Even when the new owners aren’t enjoying spectacular sunsets over the water from their Adirondack chairs or while sitting around the fire pit, they have their choice of other captivating views: of the small stream and artificial waterfall, or of spring blooms and changing autumn colors from the trails winding through more than 4 acres of forest.

An irrigation system provides easy watering for the landscaped beds, and the exterior stone retaining walls create multiple covered and open dining areas on the patio.

This house was made for entertaining. It has at least three kitchens: the primary kitchen with warm wood cabinets, a statement lighting fixture and a wet/dry bar on the same level; a second kitchen on the veranda with a Wolf range, refrigerator and pool bath; and an outdoor kitchen that includes a built-in grill and dishwasher. There’s even a snack bar just behind the home movie theater.

This home has five gas fireplaces (including one in the primary bedroom), coffered ceilings, and river views.

On warm evenings, stream a film on the outdoor TV sets, with discreet external lighting to add ambience.

Other amenities include a game room, home gym, and an elevator that opens into the three-car garage — ideal for transporting groceries and luggage.

Not only is the garage is heated, but it has a marble floor and includes a charger for an electric vehicle.

“He was so lonely,” Chizmar recalled and grinned. “I always saw the world differently than the other people around me. Even then, I was exploring the dark side.”

Now, the Bel Air resident is an acclaimed author who has penned six novels including four bestsellers. Two were co-written with horror icon Stephen King, who praises Chizmar’s “really interesting, innovative ideas.”

Chizmar has co-authored screenplays for the big and small screen, including one episode of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” anthology series, and two episodes of NBC’s “Fear Itself.”

What’s more, the horror magazine-turned-publishing company founded by Chizmar when he was a senior at the University of Maryland is thriving. Cemetery Dance Publications, now in its 36th year, has published a roster of A-list authors from Ray Bradbury to William Peter Blatty of “The Exorcist” fame.

Even Chizmar’s personal life is rosy.

He’s still married to Kara, the green-eyed girl he fell in love with as a kid. His seventh novel, “Memorials,” will be published in October, one month after the couple’s eldest son, Billy, releases his debut novel, “Them.” The second and youngest son in the family, Noah, is a star lacrosse player at the University of Virginia, where he has displayed a toughness on the field that has been praised by Sports Illustrated.

So life for the 58-year-old Chizmar is looking pretty, well, sunny.

“When my friends finally started reading my work, they’re like, ‘Rich, where does this all this solemn stuff come from?'” he recalled.

“A bookseller in New Hampshire who got an advance copy of my new novel, “Memorials,” messaged me yesterday and said, ‘I’ve had nightmares two nights in a row. You’re going to mess people up.'”

An expression of pure joy crossed Chizmar’s face.

“I just loved that,” he said. “I told her, ‘I can do no better, unless I can make people cry.'”

He knows that an awful lot of people crave being scared out of their wits, though exactly how that mechanism works remains mysterious. What is it about feeling bad that makes some people feel so good?

Behavioral scientist Haiyang Yang, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, speculated in a university blog post last fall that fans of horror and suspense are unusually self-assured. People who flock to scary movies are confident they can overcome the obstacles fate throws in their paths, he wrote — a description that fits Chizmar like the cover of a book.

“When we first began publishing the magazine, I would go out to the newspaper box in front of my apartment building at 1 a.m.,” Chizmar said.

“I knew that by that time, no one was going to buy what was left. I would plunk a quarter into the box and take out all the newspapers and use them to pack up the books. We shipped them in boxes we found in dumpsters. I remember thinking, ‘Can you imagine being successful enough to buy boxes to pack your products in?'”

Chizmar and King have known each other professionally since 1989. At the time, King had been famous for nearly two decades, and when he sent Chizmar a signed promotional blurb for the fledgling “Cemetery Dance” magazine, it pretty much guaranteed that the new publisher could continue paying his bills for at least the next few months.

Over time, and after thousands of text exchanges and good-natured jibes about the rising and falling fortunes of the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox, King became familiar with the younger man’s fiction. And when he found himself facing writer’s block, he turned to Chizmar for help.

The result was “Gwendy’s Button Box,” the first novel of a trilogy. The first and last books were written jointly by the two authors, while the second was penned by Chizmar alone.

“Rich basically bailed me out,” King said.

“He has a good feel for suburban life, for middle-class Baltimore and its backyard barbecues and the room in the basement where the kids hang out. I would call what he does ‘middle-class fantasy horror make-believe, with a kind of ‘Twilight Zone’ feel.'”

Even when Chizmar was growing up in Harford County, the youngest of five children of an airman who worked on the Aberdeen Proving Ground and an Ecuadorian homemaker, he was possessed of a keen sense that the best moments in life are fleeting.

He remembers one time in particular when that revelation struck him hard.

“I was about 14,” he recalled. “We had been sledding, but all my friends had gone home. It was dusk and the snow was falling and the lights were glowing. I could see my house off in the distance. I thought, ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same after this. We’re all growing up. People are going to leave, and some of us are never coming back.'”

That’s the moment that made Chizmar a writer.

“I am the one who is cursed and blessed to remember everything,” he said. “It helps to put it down on paper. I became a writer to help people make sense of the world.”

Perhaps. But it also seems likely that Chizmar became a horror writer because he likes to surprise people and make them laugh. His acute sense of life’s darker moments is paired with an equally well-developed mischievous streak.

A case in point are his two cinema-verite books, “Chasing the Boogeyman” and “Becoming the Boogeyman,” in which Chizmar goes to great lengths to trick his readers into thinking they’re reading a memoir instead of a novel.

The books are narrated by a young man named Richard Chizmar who moved back home with his parents to save money for his upcoming wedding — all details pulled from the author’s life. The books mix historic events, including a real-life criminal known in the 1980s as the Phantom Fondler, with a made-up serial killer.

The novel even includes black-and-white photos purporting to show the “killer” being handcuffed by police officers. In reality, the murderer and cops were costumed actors, and Chizmar took the photos himself.

“I’m just a big kid,” he admitted.

That turned out to be a very good thing. The author’s innate playfulness has helped him cope with occasional but genuine hardships, including his encounter at age 29 with a real-lifeserial killer: testicular cancer.

“After I was diagnosed, I had two operations,” Chizmar said. “And then my doctors declared me clear. They said there was a 99% chance the cancer would never come back.”

But six months later, Chizmar went to the emergency room after he found himself once again in great pain.

“My poor doctor had to tell me the cancer had spread to both lungs, my liver, my stomach and my lymph nodes,” he said. “I was given a 50% chance of survival.”

And still, the snowman refused to melt.

“I said, ‘If anyone can beat this, it will be me,” Chizmar recalled. “I told my doctors, ‘Tell me what to do, and I will do it better than any patient you have ever had.'”

As he had vowed that he would, Chizmar recovered fully. But even as he and Kara rejoiced, they were hit with another setback.

“After 12 weeks of chemotherapy, the doctors told us that so much poison was being shot into my body that we would not be able to have children the natural way,” he said.”But five years later, there came Billy. And four years after that, there came Noah. I wake up grateful every day.”

More than most of us, Chizmar knows how easily human existence can be snuffed out. But instead of frightening him, he views that painful reality as a cause for celebration.

“Life is fragile, but I’m an optimist,” he said, and then segued into a related thought:

“People tell me that the good thing about my stories is that they always contain a ray of hope.”

“I didn’t know we could talk politics,” Pelosi told an overflow crowd of about 600 people, and then glanced around the room. “I think we’re talking civics here right now, right?” The audience chuckled.

Pelosi was referring to an IRS regulation that prohibits nonprofit organizations such as the Pratt from campaigning on behalf of candidates running for public office.

“Kamala Harris should be elected president of the United States because she is the best person for the job,” Pelosi said, and then went on to explain the message she thinks the Democratic Party must convey to win the election.

“People vote in their self-interest,” she said, “and we want to make sure they see their self-interest clearly in the distinction between the two parties.

“We have to make that case to the American people. It hasn’t been made strongly enough. They don’t fully appreciate it, and we take responsibility for their lack of appreciation. But we want to drive the message home.”

Pelosi is the daughter of a former congressman and mayor of Baltimore (Thomas D’Alesandro Jr.) and the sister of another city mayor, (Thomas D’Alesandro III).

She often describes her career trajectory as “housewife to House member to House speaker.” She didn’t seek political office for the first time until 1987, when she was 46 and after Alexandra, the youngest of her five children, told her, “Mother, get a life.”

Twenty years later, Pelosi made history by becoming the first woman to be elected House speaker and the first woman to lead a major political party in either chamber of Congress.

She came to the Pratt to discuss her second book, “The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House,” which was published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.

Pelosi played to her audience during her hourlong presentation by making several references to her hometown. Sometimes, that meant describing her lilac silk suit as “Ravens purple” or talking about the role the Pratt played in her own life. Other times, it meant singling out Democratic politicians for praise, from U.S. Rep Kweisi Mfume, who was in the audience, to Rep. Jamie Raskin and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who did not appear to be.

Karsonya Wise Whitehead, who moderated the discussion, didn’t ask Pelosi two questions on many audience members’ minds: whether she helped persuade U.S. President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, as has been widely assumed, and the extent to which Pelosi might have influenced Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.

But Pelosi repeatedly criticized the Republican nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump.

She described hiding with other congressional leaders at Fort McNair on Jan. 6, 2021, as marauders carrying weapons and zip ties roamed the halls of the U.S. Capitol, demanding, “Where’s Nancy?”

“I had to remain calm because there was insanity at the White House,” Pelosi said.

“It was awful. There can be no denying that this was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. The question is whether we will have a peaceful transfer of power the next time we have an election.”

Pelosi has a reputation as a master strategist, and “The Art of Power” is less a memoir than it is a practical treatise on how she pushed the votes through on key initiatives, such as the Affordable Care Act.

The book discusses the impact that America’s increasing political polarization has had on Pelosi’s life in two chapters: the Jan. 6 riots and the attack on Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in the couple’s San Francisco home in the early morning of Oct. 28, 2022.

Paul Pelosi, then 82, was seriously injured when he was hit three times in the head with a hammer by an intruder who demanded to know the whereabouts of the congresswoman, who was in Washington at the time. Pelosi, who admitted that she feels survivor guilt, resigned as House speaker a few weeks later.

Nancy Pelosi, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Stacey Abrams to speak at Pratt Library

“We have to bring this country together,” she said. “We don’t want women or young people or anybody coming into politics to have any fear for themselves or their families.”

Though she decried political violence in general, Pelosi did not mention the July 13 attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Mfume said after the presentation that Pelosi’s influence hasn’t diminished one iota in the 20 months since she stepped down as House speaker. He thinks that laying down her leadership responsibilities has liberated Pelosi by freeing her to speak more candidly.

“If anything,” Mfume said, “her influence has grown.”

List Price: $3.75 million

Year built: 2013

Real estate agent: Bob Lucido of Keller Williams Lucido Agency

Last sale price/date: For $725,000 on July 28, 2010

Property size: 14,288-square-foot home has five bedrooms, six full bathrooms and one half bathroom, an attached four-car garage and a swimming pool on 4.22 acres.

Unique features: While this Ellicott City home is unique by any measure, there is no question what the main conversation piece will be — a curving, custom-built, interior slide that starts on the top floor and then winds down three levels. Riders are deposited into the open space between the foyer and living room and near one of the home’s two see-through fireplaces.

And that’s just one of three ways to access the upper, street-level and lower floors: The owners can also zip up and down in a round glass elevator or make a leisurely descent on the grand curved staircase. Another clever feature with convenience in mind — a laundry chute that dumps dirty clothes into a cabinet built above the washing machine and dryer.

The home is surrounded by mature trees and is reached by a circular driveway and a covered entranceway supported by four pillars. A long outdoor rear deck on the upper level overlooks more than four wooded acres, along with the saltwater pool with a waterfall and an in-ground jetted jacuzzi.

There are his-and-her changing rooms by the pool, an indoor sauna, and on the lower level, a billiards room and home gym.

The walk-in closet in the main bedroom is large enough to pitch a tent between the clothes racks. Other interior features include two-story windows, soaring vaulted ceilings, and heated seats on the bathroom bidets.

This house backs onto Benson Branch Park, which features quiet trails, bird song and wildlife.

“If there is any lesson that I have learned from this year, it is to plan for the Plan B,” said Rachel Graham, CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, the quasi-government agency tasked with mounting city festivals.

Even as Graham’s staff was dismantling the white tents that dotted the festival’s footprint in the Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill neighborhoods, she and city officials already were thinking about what — if anything — should be done differently for the 2025 festival.

“We might need a Plan B location for the Artscape concerts, though that presents logistical challenges,” she said.

This was supposed to be the year that Artscape returned to a semblance of normalcy. Often described as the largest free outdoor public art festival in the U.S., Artscape was shuttered in 2020, 2021 and 2022 by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2023, Tropical Storm Ophelia caused the festival to cancel all activities for safety reasons on Saturday, the event’s only full day.

A destructive lightning storm that toppled trees, closed roads and dumped nearly three inches of rain on city streets caused Artscape to cancel its two major headliner performers this weekend: “Queen of Soul” Chaka Khan on Friday and iconic percussionist Sheila E. on Saturday and sent crowds hurrying home.

While Khan and Sheila E. didn’t perform, BOPA was contractually obligated to pay them anyway. Graham didn’t have a firm figure for the entertainment budget for this year’s festival, but thought it might be around $350,000.

The storm even wreaked havoc with Sunday’s headliner, The Original Wailers, a popular reggae group styled after Bob Marley, when drummer Anthony Watson’s flight was grounded on route to Baltimore. BOPA’s logistics team found a substitute drummer from Washington in time for Sunday’s concert, Graham said.

The weekend storms appeared to have caused no serious damage to either festivalgoers or costly equipment.

“When you consider the impact of this storm, we were remarkably fortunate,” Graham said.

None of the white tents secured to the ground with weights were overturned by the storms, though Jack Danna, director of commercial revitalization for the Central Baltimore Partnership was one of about half a dozen volunteers who got soaked while struggling to manually hold down a tent during the worst of Saturday’s storm. They were attempting — successfully — to shelter the expensive sound equipment for a dance floor that Mobtown Ballroom had set up in the middle of Charles Street.

“Well,” Danna said, “everyone knows that at Artscape rain is always a possibility.”

He and Ellen Janes, the partnership’s executive director, said they considered this Artscape a success.

“It’s a great festival,” Janes said. “It’s worth the effort of putting it on. We really see it as a way of building community and elevating local artists, and this Artscape accomplished that.”

City Council President Nick Mosby pointed out that bad weather at Artscape is not unusual.

An analysis of temperature and precipitation data recorded by the National Weather Service from 2000 to 2024 for Artscape weekends showed there have only been five festival weekends when there wasn’t any precipitation recorded and the daily high temperature wasn’t at least 95 degrees.

Moreover, the very first Artscape, which was held in June 1982, was marred by torrential rains on two of the festival’s three days, sending musical acts fleeing inside different venues, including the Fifth Regiment Armory.

“I’m not a fan necessarily of moving Artscape indoors,” Mosby said. “Baltimore is such a beautiful city, and outdoor festivals are really important to the urban fabric in America. If the calendar had shifted by literally just a few days, it would have been fabulous.”

Moving concerts indoors would prevent the concerts from being canceled, but Graham said that relocating the performances indoors has its own challenges. Neither the 2,400-seat Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall nor the 2,500-seat Lyric Opera of Baltimore is large enough to accommodate crowds for headliner events, she said. Indoor concerts would be twice as expensive to stage.

“The concerts are free public events,” Graham said. “Who determines who gets in and who doesn’t?”

Graham said she finalized an agreement last week to conduct an extensive study on the economic impact of the 2024 Artscape. It will be conducted by the Greater Baltimore Committee, Visit Baltimore and possibly the Office of the Comptroller of Maryland.

The study results won’t be available for weeks or months. But Graham said that in addition to calculating an economic impact and assessing visitors, it should be able to provide estimates of everything from hotel room stays to flights taken by out-of-state visitors.

“The whole point of the festival is to use it as an economic driver,” Graham said. “Creativity and culture are so important to the economy of the city.”

“We haven’t had a full, three-day festival since 2019,” said Tonya Miller Hall, the mayor’s senior advisor for arts and culture and a BOPA board member. “This is our first chance to see how Artscape truly performs.”

The festival’s budget this year is about $1.1 million — a sum that has remained unchanged for roughly two decades — with about $600,000 coming from corporate support. The remainder is a mix of city, state and federal dollars.

The 44,000 visitors who attended the 2023 festival was just a fraction of the estimated 350,000 people who participated pre-pandemic, and less than 3% of the 1.5 million visitors during Artscape’s heyday in the 1990s, when Baltimore played host to such musical superstars as Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez and Patti LaBelle.

At that time, it seemed as though Artscape, widely described as the largest free public arts festival in the U.S.,  was unstoppable — and then along came a global pandemic, a year-long bout of controversy and mismanagement, After Artscape 2023 finally reopened, Tropical Storm Ophelia followed, which forced the cancellation of all activities for Saturday, the festival’s longest day.

Though no hurricanes are on the horizon for this year’s festival, Artscape 2024 is shaping up to be hot, steamy — and very likely rainy, with high temperatures in the mid to upper 90s and a 50-70% chance of thunderstorms on all three days.

“We’re in active negotiations with the rain gods,” joked Rachel Graham, chief executive officer of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, the quasi-governmental agency that mounts Artscape and other public city celebrations.

Graham said she has set goals for Artscape’s performance appropriate for a rebuilding phase.

“If we hit 150,000 visitors this year, I will be really happy,” she said.

Likewise, she is aiming for an economic impact “somewhere in the middle” of the $12 million generated by the shortened, 2023 Artscape and the pre-pandemic high of $28.5 million.

“In the future, I definitely want to eclipse $29 million,” she said.

While the city has established specific financial goals for BOPA (the agency is expected to generate $256 million in economic impact, and a return of $110 for every city dollar spent), Hall said the city has not set targets for individual festivals such as Artscape.

“We’re not dictating a dollar goal for the festival,” she said. “This year is the restart, a test to see what the economic impact of Artscape on Baltimore can actually be.”

A study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that one in every four U.S. adults, or 55 million people, attended at least one of the more than 1,400 arts festivals in the U.S. in 2008. Some of those festivals have been around since the 1960s, and they have a demographic profile that is the envy of performing arts groups nationwide.

“By gender and racial/ethnic composition, festival audiences resemble the general population as described by U.S. Census figures,” the report found.

Darius Irani, the chief economist for Towson University’s Regional Economic Studies Institute, said that arts festivals sprang up nationwide in the 1980s, a time when urban centers were in decline and many middle-class Americans were fleeing cities for the suburbs.

Festivals, like Artscape which debuted June 11, 1982, were perceived as a way to lure people downtown.

“Baltimore was a very challenged city,” Irani said, “with a high crime rate and declining population. Arts festivals were seen as a way to reinvigorate and shed a positive light on cities struggling with demographic change.”

The Economic Studies Institute prepares analyses of fiscal and policy impact for stage agencies, and Irani said that out-of-state visitors to Artscape will spend on average between $175 and $250. Every dollar they spend will generate an average of $2.10 in gross domestic support.

What’s more, every vendor, electrician, food service worker and artist at Artscape will likely support two additional jobs statewide, and Irani said that a third of the supported jobs would be considered new jobs.

In addition, Irani said, over the years the arts festival has acquired a unique local flavor.

“You couldn’t take Artscape and put it into another city,” he said. “It wouldn’t have the roots and flavor of Baltimore.”

Artscape’s 40th edition will feature 100 artists in the popular Artists’ Market, more than 50 food and beverage vendors, and three entertainment stages featuring more than 40 acts from hip-hop to country.

In a nod to the early 1980s, the marquee acts will be “Queen of Funk” Chaka Khan and the acclaimed drummer and percussionist Sheila E.

New this year will be “The Get Down Series,” or after-hours programming, as well as a two-day project organized by the community group West Baltimore United about the controversial “Highway to Nowhere.”

Festivalgoers can expect to find nods to Artscape’s early days in tributes to Baltimore House Music, and to the MacArthur Award-winning artist Joyce J. Scott, who exhibited at the first Artscape in 1982.

The festival provided artists with an important income stream even 40 years ago — and it continues today.

Shawn Theron said he counts on the yearly three-day extravaganza to supply as much as a third of his annual income.

“Artscape is typically my biggest event of the year,” said Theron, who creates colorful “orb paintings” on recycled wood, house parts and other found materials. “I work for months beforehand to get ready for it.”

Artscape organizers also asked the public to share their favorite festival memories.

One response came from Lisa LaPrade, director of recreational programming for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services, who wrote about the 2023 festival, which included a display of artwork by imprisoned youth.

“Every piece sold,” LaPrade wrote. “Our youth didn’t participate in it for the money. It gave them such a sense of pride, and it is something they will never forget.”

The spectacles were in Lincoln’s pockets when he was fatally shot at Washington’s Ford Theatre on April 14, 1865, and are on display to the public for free in the Library of Congress’ newly opened David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery.

The gallery opened in June following a $40 million renovation, 25% of which was donated by Rubenstein, the Orioles’ owner and Baltimore native.

The bit of thread from Lincoln’s pocket is knotted tightly and trimmed neatly. It was hard not to speculate how the glasses might have been damaged. Did Lincoln knock them off his desk? Or, did the 16th president, working late at night, read while sprawled on one side, weakening the stems?

“You can imagine yourself doing something like that,” said Hayden, the longtime Baltimore resident who for the past eight years has presided over the Library of Congress. “The contents of Lincoln’s pockets humanize him.”

Lincoln’s glasses are among the roughly 120 artifacts on display in “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress,” an exhibit that gives the public access for the first time to highlights of the roughly 178 million objects in the institution’s collection.

Rubenstein didn’t respond to a request for an interview, but said in a news release that it’s “important to preserve America’s treasures because the human brain still operates more effectively when it sees something for real.”

There’s a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, but also the golden record sent aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 with greetings in 55 languages to whatever intelligent life might someday find it.

There’s a crystal flute that former First Lady Dolley Madison is thought to have saved as the British set the White House ablaze in The War of 1812, but also Oscar Hammerstein II’s not entirely successful early stab at writing the lyrics for “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music.”

“Sow is what farmers do with wheat,” does not flow trippingly off the tongue.

Hayden said that Rubenstein told her that his lifelong love of books began at the Forest Park branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library — the system Hayden ran for more than two decades before taking the job in Washington.

“Mr. Rubenstein told me he would take 12 books out at one time,” she said. “That was the limit. He would read them all in a week, and then come back and take out 12 more.”

The idea for the gallery came to Hayden in 2016 when she was interviewing for her current job. She was told that many of the library’s treasures were too old and fragile to be exhibited publicly.

There had to be a way, Hayden thought, to make these artifacts available to the American taxpayers who own them — and not just digital images, but the worn, frayed, unassuming objects themselves.

“This is the people’s library,” Hayden said, “and I wanted to open up the treasure chest.  I thought, ‘What if we had a permanent gallery where we could rotate treasures in and out to protect them?”

She knew she already had a jewel box to display the treasures. The Library of Congress — filled with light and marble and columns and statues and surfaces embellished with gold leaf — has been described as one of the most beautiful buildings in Washington.

“The Library of Congress was modeled on an Italian palace to show that in this country, we build palaces to knowledge, not monarchy,” Hayden said.

The artifacts are exhibited in specially built display cases controlled for temperature and humidity and open in the back so that items can be swapped out easily. The lighting in the gallery is kept intentionally low.

“Staff members nominated items they thought would fit into the inaugural exhibit,” curator Cheryl Regan said. “After a while, we started to sense synergies between objects.”

Below is half a dozen highlights of the collection — including some Maryland visitors won’t want to miss:

• Contents of Lincoln’s pockets: In addition to his eyeglasses, the personal items Lincoln had stuffed into his pockets the night he was assassinated include a Confederate $5 bill, a white linen handkerchief —used — with “A. Lincoln” embroidered in red and a newspaper clipping praising Lincoln’s leadership. The 16th president, it seems, needed an occasional pat on the back as much as the rest of us.
• The Gettysburg Address: On view is the original, handwritten draft that historians think the president carried when he made his historic remarks. The first and second pages are written on different types of paper, possibly indicating that they were written at various times. The first page bears the letterhead “Executive Mansion,” (the former name for The White House), and is beige, while the unadorned second page is white. “By the time Lincoln got to the battlefield, he had already prepared what he was going to say,” Hayden said. “After the tour, he went back to the hotel, wrote the second page and returned later to deliver the address.”
• James Madison’s crystal flute: The crystal flute was presented to the fourth president in 1813 in honor of his second inauguration — but wasn’t destined to remain at the White House for long. In 1814, as the British troops advanced on Washington, First Lady Dolley Madison is thought to have rescued the flute, possibly by packing it in a wagon containing household goods. More than 208 years later, the rap artist Lizzo, a classically-trained flautist, borrowed the instrument for a 2022 concert in Washington. “Now we know the flute can be played,” Regan said. “It sounded pretty good.”
• Ancient Cuneiform tablets: These unfired clay tablets, roughly the size of a human palm, are about 4,000 years old and date from the area that is modern-day Iraq. Regan said these tablets were used by Sumerian scribes learning the cuneiform writing system. The tablets weren’t fired, so the clay impressions could be dissolved with a little water and reused — not unlike a modern blackboard.  “We have transcribed some of the cuneiform writing,” Regan said. “It was all about counting pints and barrels of beer.”
• 1880s Baltimore Orioles scorecard: According to the yellowing scorecard on view, Jack Manning lead off for the Baltimore Orioles in a game played on April 8 sometime in the 1880s and Joe Sommer batted clean-up. Their opponent?  A Brooklyn team possibly known as the Grays, the Bridegrooms, or Trolley Dodgers. Admission cost 25 cents. While the scorecard is difficult to read, it appears that Brooklyn defeated The Birds six to three.
• Frances B. Johnston’s wooden view camera: This 1893 universal camera with its accordion-like bellows, was frequently used by Johnston, a former Baltimorean and pioneering female photographer. During her half-century career, Johnston frequently photographed intimate family scenes at the White House, and took portraits of such famous folk as author Mark Twain and suffragette Susan B. Anthony. “She graduated from Notre Dame of Maryland,” Hayden said, and her mother wrote for The Baltimore Sun.”