Victory — not the concept, but the statue at State Place and 17th Street NW — is the Ghost of Christmas Past. Freedom — the Eastward-facing statue atop the Capitol Dome; not that thing that The Terrorists hate us for — is the Ghost of Christmas Present. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrives draped in the inky robes of Grief. This stunt-casting of local landmarks as Charles Dickens’ familiar trio of…

Ah, Wilderness! is the lone comedy in Eugene O’Neill’s eye-gougingly tragic catalog. It works as a sort of photo-negative of his later, bleaker masterpiece A Long Day’s Journey into Night, with which it shares the setting of a “large small town” in early 20th century New England. Written in the early years of the Great Depression but set in the happier days of 1906, it’s a deliberately idyllic take on the sweet miseries of…

MONDAY: Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, will be at Politics and Prose to talk about her latest book, Peony in Love. 7 p.m. We had to yell “STOP THE PRESSES!” for this one. Laura Sessions Stepp, our favorite Washington Post personality, will be at Arlington Central Library to promote her latest book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both. For those of you unfamiliar with…

The Roosevelt’s debut EP is a bit like the FDR Memorial: A lot of people out there will say, “There’s a Roosevelt memorial?” while others will keep trying to persuade their friends and family to check it out. The comparisons pretty much end there. Our 32nd president led the country through the Great Depression and most of World War II. The Roosevelt are just trying to make a name for themselves in the D.C. music…

In Eating Your Words, former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes discusses what’s in a sandwich name — be it hoagie, wedge, muffuletta, Cubano, rocket, garibaldi, zeppelin, or spuckie. Region seems to dictate names as much as anything. Grimes attributes the Philadelphia “hoagie” to flapper-era Philadelphia jazz musician Al De Palma — who apparently said, “you had to be a hog to eat it.” During the Great Depression in 1936, he opened up a…

People Like Sandwiches: No, people love sandwiches. The Post reports that the carb craze is over and people are flocking to places that have been cashing in on the renaissance of sandwich making. From the Post: A proliferating number of sandwich chains such as Potbelly Sandwich Works, Panera Bread, Corner Bakery and Cosi that offer such items as tuna and Swiss cheese on multigrain bread, a grilled Italian panini on rosemary-onion focaccia, or tandoori chicken…

First Sandy Berger’s sock incident at the National Archives, then Nicholas Cage breaks into Archives, now there’s a missing portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the Archives’ collection, according to WTOP. But there are other items missing, including dozens of presidential pardons. The Archives admits that the FDR portrait may be sitting in a landfill after being accidentally thrown out, but other items have turned up on eBay. We did a quick search on eBay…