3 min read

I first set foot in the Kennedy Center as a middle school student 50 years ago for a performance by the great French mime Marcel Marceau.

I remember watching Marceau on stage, his face painted white, tugging on an unseeable rope and plucking petals from invisible flowers, this brilliant pantomimist who never said a word as he created a world. His genius was obvious enough to impress even a cynical eighth grader.

In the years that followed, I saw a few symphonies at the Kennedy Center, enjoyed a play or two, and once shook hands in the lobby with Jean Stapleton, who played Archie Bunker’s wife on television.

For me, the Kennedy Center was a glittering place on the Potomac River that hosted a never-ending parade of talent. These were the sort of events I could rarely afford but never wanted to miss. They inspired me.

Like many Americans, I feel great pain at what’s been happening to the Kennedy Center.

President Donald Trump insists the center needs major repairs. It might, but it’s hard to seriously take a president who has installed bootlicking lackeys to manage that work.

Trump, who shut down the building entirely last week, said he won’t move forward with the renovation work unless the courts allow him to put his name on the building alongside President Kennedy. He’s also threatened to rip it down.

This makes me sad and angry.

During my last visit, I saw “Les Misérables,” shortly before the musical opened on Broadway. I can still feel the power of a  production that captured the relentless nature of an oppressive regime, the anguish of the poor and the never-ending dream of justice.

That sort of art digs deep into your soul. I hear its refrain in my head regularly, a constant challenge to “join in the fight that will give you the right to be free!”

It’s an always-relevant song of hope for a better world.

Though it’s been decades since I lived in the nation’s capital, I have no doubt the Kennedy Center has exposed hundreds of thousands of people like me to some of the great art of our times: incredible plays, astounding music, the soaring genius of creativity unleashed and placed on stage.

Now this national gem is as silent as Marceau, but without his movement or expressions. The Kennedy Center sits empty, its future uncertain as Trump tries to bully its champions into adding, illegally, his name beside Kennedy’s on the building’s wall.

At Amherst College in 1963, Kennedy explained that for art “to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth.”

The truth and President Trump are mutually exclusive. The only thing that matters to Trump is, as always, Trump.

The rest of us know the Kennedy Center “belongs to the American people. Now and always,” as Rep. Chellie Pingree said in May. We’d better save it.