The New York Times' weekend edition painted a perfectly dismal picture of life in and around the nation's capital, partly to do with sequester and partly with Lindsay Lohan.
Trip Gabriel's front page story on the sequester-related demise of of the Northern Virginia economy had Gabriel hanging around a bus depot outside the Pentagon, talking to commuters about unpleasant changes they're making to their lives due to the $85 billion in spending cuts ordered by President Obama on Friday. The article ends with a commuter asking Gabriel if he knows of any leads for part time work.
D.C.'s problems are detailed again, but differently, in the Times' Sunday Styles section, where Lindsay Lohan's former assistant Gavin Doyle airs his complaints about Washington (spoiler: they don't involve budget cuts or bus depots).
Doyle is described in his three-page profile as someone who "has become a regular presence on Web sites that exhaustively chronicle [New York's] party scene, a part of a glittering social circle and even an occasional tabloid figure, thanks to the antics of Lindsay Lohan, a close associate. He sees himself as a kind of intermediary between various celebrity worlds."
He does not, however, see himself as a fan of the District, having very unhappily, according to the article, gone to college here:
He attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., but found it “a miserable place."
“Everything closed at 5 p.m.,” he said with disdain. “Everything was wrong. It was a giant party school with a bunch of rich kids.”
Lonely and depressed, he moved to New York and transferred to a design and business program at Parsons, with a minor in photography.
A bizarre coda unrelated to D.C., though possibly related to a person's tolerance for the antics of Lindsay Lohan: Doyle told the New York Times that he'd like to do a book, like Helmut Newton's Private Property, using his own photos of the starlet.
“The camera loves her and she’s in love with the camera. She basically became a photo muse of mine,” he said.
Then Monday it was reported that Doyle -- widely reported be Lohan's former assistant, though he told the Times this is a misconception -- has been cooperating with prosecutors and is expected to be a key witness in Lohan's upcoming reckless driving trial. He was with Lohan when she smashed a Porche last June on a California highway.
Finally, to answer Doyle's observation about early restaurant closing times, while D.C.'s late-night dining scene has admittedly had its hiccups, there's always The Diner.
