Midday

Tom's next guests are two African American women who are helping to address homelessness in Baltimore, and helping women learn the skills they need to build houses, and build wealth.

LaQuida Chancey is the founder and CEO of Smalltimore Homes, an enterprise that works to provide people living in poverty with a variety of affordable paths to home ownership.

Shelley Halstead is the founder and CEO of Black Women Build, a not-for-profit organization that fosters home ownership and wealth-building by training Black women in carpentry, electrical, and plumbing skills to restore vacant and deteriorated houses in West Baltimore.

LaQuida Chancey and Shelley Halstead join us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today on Midday, conversations about building community through solar energy and affordable housing. A little later, Tom speaks with two African American women who are helping to address homelessness in Baltimore, and helping women learn the skills they need to build houses, and build wealth. LaQuida Chancey of Smalltimore Homes and Shelley Halstead of Black Women Build will join Tom in the second half of our show today.

We begin with two women whose work revolves around the sun.

Kimberly Armstrong is the Maryland Program Director for Solar United Neighbors. She is also a member of the Environmental Justice Partnership, and the Baltimore chapter of the American Association of Blacks in Energy.

Kristal Hansley is the first Black woman CEO in the community solar industry. She is the founder and CEO of WeSolar, Inc., which makes affordable community solar accessible to under-resourced communities.

Kimberly Armstrong and Kristal Hansley join us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today on Midday, it’s Midday on Cars! Tom's guest is John Davis, the creator, producer and host of MotorWeek, now in its 41st season. It’s produced at Maryland Public Television (MPT) here in Maryland and syndicated on PBS stations across the land.

For the past many months, it’s been a challenging time to be in the market for a new set of wheels. Computer chips are still scarce, and that continues to affect the price of both new and used cars. This past weekend was mild in the Baltimore metro area, but Winter is Coming, as they used to say on Game of Thrones. What should we be sure to check before the weather gets seriously cold?

John Davis is with us for the hour today to take your questions and comments about all things automotive…You can give us a call at 410.662.8780, Tweet us: @middayWYPR or email us at [email protected].

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

And lastly on today's edition of Midday on the Arts, our theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom for another of her weekly reviews of the region's thespian offerings. This week, she has reviews of two plays now running concurrently at Baltimore Center Stage.

The first is ArtsCentric's ambitious production of Dreamgirls, the 1980s hit Broadway musical about a trio of young female singers aspiring to success. The sprawling cast is directed by Artscentric's founder and artistic director, Kevin S. McAllister. Musical Supervision is by Cedric D. Lyles, with choreograophy by Shalyce Hemby.

The second play is the Center Stage production of Fires in the Mirror, playwright Anna Deavere Smith's powerful, one-woman evocation of the strife between Black and Jewish communities that erupted in New York City in the summer of 1991. The Center Stage production is directed by Nicole Brewer. (Tom Hall spoke about Fires with Nicole Brewer, Center Stage Artistic Director Stephanie Ybarra and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, along with two scholars, here on Midday earlier this month).

The play is being presented in partnership with the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut.

Theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins us today on Zoom.

Both productions are running at Center Stage until December 19. For ticketing information for Dreamgirls, click here. For Fires in the Mirror, click here.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Next on today's Midday on the Arts:

Baltimore's Everyman Theater is presenting The Skin of Our Teeth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder that premiered on Broadway on November 18, 1942, at a time when the world was convulsed by global war. The new production at Everyman opens tonight, Dec 10, a few days after the 80th anniversary of Japan's 1941attack on Pearl Harbor. That event led the US to go to war and was a major inspiration for Thornton Wilder to write the The Skin of Our Teeth.

The comic play, a groundbreaking and still-resonant satirical work that addresses the anxieties sparked by a world in chaos, continues at the Everyman through January 2nd. For ticket info, click here.

Joining Tom now to talk about the challenges and rewards of working on Everyman's new production of The Skin of Our Teeth are Noah Himmelstein, Everyman's Assistant Artistic Director and the director of the play, and Felicia Curry, an ET resident company actor who plays the lead role of Sabina.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It’s Midday on the Arts. A little later in this hour, Tom checks in with our theater critic, J Wynn Rousuck, for her reviews of two shows at Baltimore Center Stage. Tom will also talk to some folks from Baltimore's Everyman Theater about their new production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.

But we begin with two classically trained string players who have reimagined the repertoire and the audience for their instruments. In 2004, two high school buddies from Broward County, Florida, formed the duo Black Violin. Here’s Wil B on viola and Kev Marcus on violin with a little taste of Black Violin from their 2020 release, a holiday album called Give Thanks. This is their take on the classic, Joy to the World.

Black Violin is in the middle of a national tour that has them playing the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall here in Baltimore tonight (Dec.10), for one show only. They’ll be joined on stage by DJ SPS and drummer Nat Stokes. Their show starts at 8:00. For ticketing information, click here.

Wil Baptiste and Kev Marcus join us on Zoom from south Florida. Their conversation with Tom was recorded earlier this week, so we can't take any calls.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

The intractable rate of violent crime is certainly one of our city’s most pressing problems, and the Mayor has said repeatedly it is his highest priority. Yesterday, the Mayor announced his “Action Plan” for the next three years. He made no mention of the fact that he has yet to reach his goal of a 15% annual reduction in homicides.Today on Midday, a discussion of what many view as another public safety issue: what to do about Squeegee Kids.It’s an issue that strikes people viscerally, and it often divides along racial lines.Squeegee Kids or Squeegee workers or Squeegee people, or Squeegee whatever you want to call them, have been an on and off topic that has preoccupied people at various times over the last 40 years.

Before we begin our conversation, a little background:

In 1985, then-police Commissioner Bishop L. Robinson advocated for a bill that would make windshield washing on the street illegal, and subject to a $50 fine for offenders over the age of 18. The City Council passed that bill, divided along racial lines. A subsequent version of the bill that included training on safety and courtesy to drivers, IDs, uniforms, and designated areas for offering squeegee services was signed into law by Mayor William Donald Schaefer.The rationale was one of public safety. A year after the bill passed, a young boy named Howard Bradshaw was hit by a truck and killed on Maryland Avenue while squeegeeing.For years, the supposed prohibition about squeegeeing has largely been ignored.

In 2017, then-Mayor Catherine Pugh formed the “Squeegee Corps,” an initiative that was similar to the 1985 iteration. It lasted less than a year. Mayor Jack Young announced another program in 2019. I spoke about it on Midday with Tisha Edwards, who was at the time, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success. She said the aim of that program was to eliminate squeegeeing, which she described as panhandling.

This year, two days before Thanksgiving, Mayor Brandon Scott announced his plan to address the Squeegee issue. It is a 90-day plan in which the city will "intensify its outreach and engagement efforts." A statement announcing the plan said, “Mayor Scott will launch a Boys and Men of Color Cabinet that will engage academic, business, and community partners to build a comprehensive strategy for connecting the City’s disconnected boys and men of color to opportunity. The new strategic framework will be presented to the public in early 2022.”

Former Democratic State Senator Jim Brochin represented Baltimore County in the MD Senate from 2003-2019. Now an insurance broker in Cockeysville, Sen. Brochin co-founded and co-directs Fair Maps Maryland, a group that supports Gov. Hogan's redistricting recommendations. Recently, he called for residents of Baltimore County to boycott the city until it acts to remove squeegee kids from its streets. Midday invited Sen. Brochin to the program today to explain his position.

We asked more than a half-dozen members of the Scott administration to appear on this program to talk about it too, and they declined. Our guess is that they’re listening right now. The offer to have someone from the administration explain the Mayor’s proposal still stands. Give us a call.

We are joined by Professor Lawrence Brown, a research scientist in the Center for Urban Health Equity at Morgan State University. He’s the author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America, a book that explores the racial and spatial divide in Baltimore.

We would very much like to hear from you, as well.Are you intimidated by Squeegee kids when they approach you at traffic lights? Do you give them money and encourage them? Do you think that what they’re doing is akin to panhandling, or does it represent entrepreneurial enterprise? Should people stay away from Baltimore as long as the Squeegee kids are at some of the corners in the city?

Sen. Jim Brochin and Dr. Lawrence Brown join us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

As we approach the first anniversary of the insurrection at the US Capitol, more than 700 people have been indicted and more indictments are expected. 129 rioters have entered guilty pleas. Several have been sentenced to prison terms.Did the mob that stormed the Capitol simply coalesce around the fantasy that the election was stolen from Donald Trump? Or can the roots of the violence be traced back to rage about government that began in the 1970s?

In Charlotteville, Virginia, on the day before Thanksgiving, a federal jury found twelve defendants and five organizations liable for $26 million dollars in damages stemming from the Unite the Right rally.What effect will this verdict have on the future of the neo-Nazi and White supremacist organizations that sparked the tragic, deadly violence in 2017?

Tom's guest today is Dr. Kathleen Belew. She’s an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, where she is also the faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. She is the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

And along with Ramón Gutiérrez, she is the co-editor of, and contributor to, a new collection of essays called A Field Guide to White Supremacy, in which she and other leading scholars explore how different forms of White supremacy and hatred manifest in events like those that took place on January 6th, and extend to domestic partner violence, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-immigration, and anti-Semitism. The authors chronicle how hate groups have moved from the fringe to the mainstream in America, and they send a clear warning that the violence we’ve seen in recent years may well be repeated.

Kathleen Belew joins us on our digital line from Chicago.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's guest today is Ann Patchett, one of the most gifted writers in contemporary American literature.

She is the winner of many awards, including the Pen Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.She is the author of eight novels. Her most recent, The Dutch House, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (Tom spoke with the author about that work here on Midday in September, 2019.)

Her latest book is a wonderful collection of personal essays called These Precious Days. It’s a rich assortment of stories and reflections about dear friends, family, marriage; the art of writing, the joy of reading, how to hold tight, and when to let go. The real-life cast of characters in these essays is as fascinating and endearing and compelling as the diverse array of people she invents in her fiction, and she writes about them with tremendous grace, compassion and skill.

Ann Patchett joined Tom on Zoom last week from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, where she co-owns Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore.

(Because this conversation was recorded, we wont be taking any calls today.)

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

The trends in the coronavirus pandemic are heading up again, and this is before any possible uptick that may or may not happen with the new omicron variant. The positivity rate here in Maryland has been above 5% for about a week, and the number of daily new cases in our state has hovered around 17 or 18 hundred each day, many more than in the past several months.

Children over the age of five are now eligible to get a jab, and everybody over the age of 18 qualifies for a booster. Nationally, nearly a year into vaccine availability, only about 60% of Americans are fully vaccinated, well behind 60 other countries. Places like Portugal, Cuba, Cambodia, Iceland, and Australia all have much higher rates of fully vaccinated people. And of course, now, with booster shots recommended for those who have received the original dose, the definition of what “fully vaccinated” is may have to change.

Today on Midday, it’s the Midday HealthWatch with Dr. Leana Wen, who is always so generous with her time and willingness to answer our questions about COVID-19. Dr. Wen is an emergency physician and former Baltimore City Health Commissioner. She teaches at the George Washington University School of Public Health. She’s also a columnist for the Washington Post, a medical analyst for CNN, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health.

Dr. Leana Wen joins us on Skype…

And, as always, we welcome your questions and comments…

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.