By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Mystery shrouds the woman who sleeps on the streets in downtown Washington. Did she really attend Juilliard, as she claims? She can play the piano; that much is certain. And she can draw as well. Her color pencil portraits are exquisite.
But the name she uses to sign them -- Mary Bland -- is fictitious.
"I don't want anybody to know who I am for national security reasons," she told me.
So Mary hides out in plain sight, sketching in a sunlit courtyard at the Church of the Epiphany, near 12th and G streets NW, leaving passersby in awe.
"I saw her drawing a portrait one day and asked if she could do one of my daughters," recalled Tamika Barnes, who works as a security guard at a bank next to the church. "I gave her two wallet-size school pictures, and when I came back two days later, I was amazed. They were beautiful, so big and lifelike that my eyes got misty, and I said, 'Oh, my God, those are my babies.' "
Just another gifted street person, the stuff of movies, you might say. Like "The Soloist," now playing, about a newspaper columnist who gets to know a homeless, paranoid schizophrenic cellist and helps him find a home. Except that I don't have a clue about who Mary is. And as for getting a home for her, many have tried through the years, all in vain.
"We've had church members take Mary into their homes, but the arrangements never worked out," said the Rev. Randolph Charles, rector of the Church of the Epiphany. "It's a very complicated issue, whatever is going on inside of her head that's preventing her from using her God-given skills to carve out a different kind of life."
As Mary sees it, however, the life she has is not all that bad -- unless you count the five times she says she was assaulted and the nights that she is harassed by crack cocaine addicts.
"They blow smoke on me while I'm sleeping, and that stuff stinks to high heaven," she said. "It makes me very, very angry."
Asked why she puts up with that, Mary snapped, defensively: "I'm not mentally ill, if that's what you're saying. Every homeless person is not a drug addict, alcoholic or mentally ill."
She said she became homeless eight years ago, when an organization she was working for as a counselor to homeless women lost a grant and she lost her job.
Before that, she says, she was a movie producer, and before that, a student of classical music at Juilliard and at Mannes College, both in New York. Asked how old she is, Mary quipped, "Too young to retire, not old enough for Social Security."
After laying out colored pencils, a pencil sharper and erasers around her canvas folding chair in the church courtyard, she picked up a drawing pad and began another portrait. She had a backlog of work: photographs that passersby had dropped off for her to draw in exchange for modest donations.
Ironically, she spends her days drawing faces but lives in a world where the faces of the homeless go largely unnoticed. And it should not be overlooked that they often possess special talents -- if only a knack for survival.
"When you work outside, you have to be cognizant of where the sun is at all times, and you have to pay attention, lest the wind blows grit onto the page," she said.
Not a complaint about being homeless.
"I'm from the West, the daughter of parents who were artistically inclined," she said. "My father was a disabled veteran, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom who taught me how to draw and play the piano."
Her dream was to move back West and paint landscapes.
"I see myself having a prefabricated A-frame house put up on the side of a mountain some day, with a grand piano in the center and the rest of it as my art studio," she said.
For now, though, that dream is a long way from where she rests her head at night: a dank alcove in a federal building downtown.
"I have sort of a niche where I lay my sleeping bag, and there is a security guard who is polite and watches over me," she said. With a smile she added, "It's wonderful being your own boss."
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