The Memorial Wall

Joan Cushing, a fixture of the Washington theatrical scene who entertained audiences of all ages, first as the plume-hatted Mrs. Foggybottom in a long-running political satire revue and later as a nationally known creator of plays for children, died May 21 at a care facility in Columbia, Md. She was 77.

Her family confirmed her death and said she had Parkinson’s disease.

Ms. Cushing, a onetime schoolteacher, began her performing career at Washington-area piano bars and burst to fame as Mrs. Foggybottom, a character she conjured up to amuse bar patrons in between show tunes and standards.

Named for the neighborhood of Washington that is home to the State Department, the Watergate complex and George Washington University, Mrs. Foggybottom was a martini-sipping dowager — one of “those ladies who lunch,” as Ms. Cushing described her.

In the persona of her alter ego, Ms. Cushing skewered the city’s grandees in a cabaret-style show, “Mrs. Foggybottom and Friends,” that opened in 1986 at the New Playwrights’ Theatre, played for nearly a decade at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, appeared at the Hexagon charity revue — where Ms. Cushing was a regular — and also went on the road.

“Political satire has an essential role in this town,” Ms. Cushing told the Washington Times in 1995. “People do take themselves too seriously.”

She joined several acts in Washington, among them the Capitol Steps and Gross National Product, that delivered sendups of politicos, wonks, VIPs and wannabe VIPs in a mixture of stand-up and song. Mark Russell, perhaps Washington’s best known musical parodist, once declared of Ms. Cushing that “she has more dignity than I do.”

Her number “The Deficit Shuffle” incongruously had U.S. Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) and Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings (D-S.C.), authors of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget act of 1985, singing in rap.

Mrs. Foggybottom mounted her own campaign for the presidency on the Cocktail Party ticket. She pledged, if elected, to ensure that every American could correctly spell “hors d’oeuvres.”

In addition to her stage performances, Ms. Cushing penned a satirical column that appeared in the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call and in the Georgetowner newspaper.

She had never written for children, however, when Imagination Stage, then located at the old White Flint Mall in suburban Montgomery County, Md., commissioned her in 2001 to write a musical based on the book “Miss Nelson Is Missing!” (1977) by Harry Allard with illustrations by James Marshall.

Kathryn Chase Bryer, the director of theater at Imagination Stage, said that she and her colleagues admired the cleverness of Ms. Cushing’s lyrics for Mrs. Foggybottom and did not see her lack of experience in theater for young people as a limitation.

Ms. Cushing was a gifted storyteller, Bryer said, and the principles of storytelling are the same, whether the audience is made up of grown-ups or children. “When you’re a child you care about things passionately,” Bryer said. “They just happen to be different things than what you care about when you’re an adult.”

“Miss Nelson Is Missing!” — about a schoolteacher, her class and the dreaded substitute Viola Swamp — became one of the most popular musicals for children. (It is currently playing again at Imagination Stage, now located in Bethesda, Md.)

From that point on, Ms. Cushing devoted her career in large part to young audiences. Her works became mainstays of Imagination Stage, the Adventure Theatre at Glen Echo in Washington and other children’s theaters around the country.

She followed “Miss Nelson Is Missing!” with “Miss Nelson Has a Field Day” and brought author Barbara Park’s popular character Junie B. Jones to stage in “Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business.”

Ms. Cushing’s play “Petite Rouge,” based on a book by Mike Artell with illustrations by Jim Harris, is a Cajun retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, and “Ella’s Big Chance,” adapted from a book by Shirley Hughes, sets Cinderella in the Jazz Age.

Ms. Cushing’s play “Grace for President,” based on a book by Kelly DiPucchio and LeUyen Pham, centers on an African American girl who runs for president in a mock election at her school. It remains one of Ms. Cushing’s most popular works, according to her agent, Susan Gurman.

Joan Marie Cushing was born in Evanston, Ill., on Aug. 18, 1946. Her father was a physicist, and her mother was a Montessori teacher who raised Ms. Cushing and her seven siblings.

Ms. Cushing grew up in Winnetka, Ill., outside Chicago, before moving at age 13 to Kensington, Md., a suburb of Washington. She had years of classical music training and graduated from the Academy of the Holy Cross, an all-girls Catholic school in Kensington, in 1964. She was a 1970 elementary education graduate of the University of Maryland.

Ms. Cushing taught elementary school while moonlighting as a piano player at Washington-area bars and restaurants, including Mr. Smith’s in Georgetown and the Fire Escape Lounge in Alexandria, Va., where Mrs. Foggybottom made her debut. “One day,” Ms. Cushing told The Washington Post, “I decided that playing piano was more fun” than teaching.

Her husband, Paul Buchbinder, died in 2010 after 25 years of marriage. Survivors include a son, Ben Buchbinder of New Orleans; a stepson, Chris Buchbinder of Mill Valley, Calif.; a son from a previous relationship, Patrick Lavelle of Lafitte, La.; a sister; six brothers; and four grandchildren.

Ms. Cushing was a longtime District resident and belonged to Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown.

She wrote several plays for adults, including “Flush!,” set in a restroom at a venue that is hosting both a wedding and a funeral; “Tussaud,” about the French wax sculptor Marie Tussaud; and “Breast in Show,” a musical about the experience of breast cancer.

But her works for young people were perhaps the most enduring, if only because the collective audience of children is continually renewed.

“When I write, I don’t write for kids,” Ms. Cushing told the Nashville Tennessean. “I just write. I know in my head that a kid audience will see it, but I try not to think about that. When I was growing up, we didn’t go to children’s musicals. We just went to Broadway. And no, we didn’t get everything, but we still had a great time. Sometimes, with children’s musicals, there can be a very simple story on the surface, but another level underneath.”

Ricardo M. Urbina, a trailblazing Latino lawyer who scored victories for civil liberties as an empathetic federal judge and for civil rights as a record-breaking track star — helping to fuel an epochal protest at the 1968 Olympics — died on Monday in Washington. He was 78.

His death, in an assisted living facility, was caused by complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Ian Urbina, said.

Judge Urbina, the first Latino appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and the United States District Court in Washington, figured most prominently in cases that originated with the federal government’s war against terrorism and that put him at odds with the administration of President George W. Bush.

In 2007, he extended habeas corpus rights to Shawqi Ahmad Omar, a citizen of Jordan and the United States who was about to be transferred to Iraqi custody to be tried as a terrorist.

In 2008, Judge Urbina ordered the release of a number of prisoners being held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, including 17 from the Uyghur Muslim minority in western China. They had been imprisoned since 2002, but the judge ruled that they did not threaten the security of the United States.

In 2009, Judge Urbina dismissed the indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards who had pleaded not guilty in the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad while the guards were under U.S. government contract to escort an embassy convoy.

The judge accused State Department lawyers of a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights” by claiming that they could be fired if they refused to be interviewed about the massacre and that their statements would not be used against them in a criminal proceeding. An appeals court reinstated the charges against four of the guards; they were convicted in 2014.

In 2010, Judge Urbina upheld the District of Columbia’s strict gun regulations, but his ruling was voided by an appeals court, whose opinion was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

As the first Latino federal judge in the District of Columbia, Judge Urbina worked tirelessly to “not be the first and only,” said Kenia Seoane Lopez, a Superior Court judge in Washington. “He personified dignity, integrity and commitment at the highest levels.”

Ricardo Manuel Urbina was born on Jan. 31, 1946, in Manhattan and was raised in East Harlem and then in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he moved with his family when he was 8. His father, Luis, an immigrant from Honduras, was a machinist. His mother, Ramona (Hernandez) Urbina, who was originally from Puerto Rico, was a secretary.

Ricardo was a high school and college middle-distance track star. He set several records at various distances as a student at Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School in Queens, from which he graduated in 1963, and he won several titles, including the 1966 NCAA indoor championship in the 880-yard run, as a student at Georgetown University.

In May 1966, The New York Times described his performance at a New York Athletic Club meet in Pelham Manor, N.Y., where he finished in one minute and 48.3 seconds, as “exceptional under any circumstances.” (It was disallowed as a meet record, The Times reported, only because the starting gun was fired before any official at the starting line had blown a whistle to alert the timers.)

Judge Urbina graduated from Georgetown in 1967 with a degree in English and Hispanic culture. “I had started college trying to fulfill my parents’ wish that they have a doctor in the family — but organic chemistry ate me alive,” he recalled in an interview with Columbia University’s Center for Oral History in 2013.

He was studying law at Georgetown when he was rejected for membership in the New York Athletic Club, where he would have been the first Black member. The club, which The Times described in 1967 as “a citadel of white Christianity,” was considered the pre-eminent training ground for college graduates aspiring to make the U.S. Olympic team.

He was told only that the membership “quota” of track and field athletes had been met, but in an interview in 1968 with The Hoya, the Georgetown student newspaper, Judge Urbina blamed “a 100-year-old history of discrimination toward Negroes, Jews and other minorities by the N.Y.A.C.”

Judge Urbina was listed as white on his birth certificate, but he identified as Black, as his mother had. He said at the time that he was less interested in becoming a symbol of the Black Power movement than in inspiring young Puerto Ricans, like those who cheered him at track meets with chants of “Vaya, Ricardo.”

“I got a lot from athletics that I couldn’t have gotten at home or at school,” he told The Times in 1967. “I learned to stick to something, have faith in myself and confidence in others, like the coach, and to look at people as equals.”

He missed making the 1968 Olympic team in the trials by less than a second.

His rejection in October 1967 prompted the Black Panthers to picket the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden and triggered a boycott of the Athletic Club’s 1968 track meet, also at the Garden. The protest drew the support of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali as well as the Black American sprinters Tommie Smith and Lee Evans.

Six months later, in what some viewed as a culmination of his challenge to the N.Y.A.C., during the medal ceremony for the 200-meter sprint at the Olympics in Mexico City, Mr. Smith and the Black American runner John Carlos, in silent protest over the plight of African Americans, raised black-gloved fists as the U.S. national anthem played and bowed their heads away from the American flag.

Decades later, Judge Urbina’s grandson, Aidan, would describe the episode in a school history project as “one of the most iconic Black protests in modern history.”

In addition to his son, Ian, a former reporter for The Times and the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project, a human rights and environmental journalism group, Judge Urbina is survived by a daughter, Adrienne Jennifer Urbina; his wife, Coreen (Saxe) Urbina; two brothers, Louie and Alberto Urbina; and his grandson. His first marriage, to Joanne Elizabeth McCarron, ended in divorce.

Judge Urbina was creative when it came to sentencing defendants. He required some to write books about their transgressions to help explain the impact their actions had on themselves and on others, and he ordered most of them to appear before him again every six months to measure their progress.

He meditated daily, and learned the Japanese martial art Aikido when he was in his 50s, according to a 2011 profile in The Washington Post.

“I try to see where my biases and prejudices that day are hiding,” he told The Post. “If you don’t find them, they have a tendency to come out at the most unusual of times.”

His priority, he said, was rehabilitation, to return defendants to society. “I do not have a passion for punishment,” he said. “If there is a way the court can contribute to the rehabilitation process, it is more likely the person will return to the mainstream.”

John James Katsaros died with his wife and one of his sons by his side at Coterie, a senior living facility, in San Francisco, CA, at 72.

Born in Astoria, NY to Gus and Mary Katsaros, the family later moved to Massapequa Park, NY on Long Island. But the real family locus growing up was always Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where John and his brother Arthur, as well as their cousins - Marilyn, Hope, Donna, Carol, to name a few - spent countless summers, playing cards (Canasta) in the sun at the Trotting Park Beach in West Dennis or perfecting their soft serve cones while working summer jobs at the Kream ‘N Kone.

John graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in Elec-trical Engineering, which gave him the itch to move to California, together with a job offer at Fairchild Semiconductors. A fresh face in the Bay Area, he and his fraternity brother, Steve Cox, met lifelong friends like Jim Willenborg. In 1993, John and his business partner and dear friend Larry Gordon, founded the Internet Research Group, a security and infrastructure research agency, which was later bought by Jupiter Communications in 2000. He got an MBA from Santa Clara University, and authored two books: Selling High-Tech: High Ticket (1993) and Getting It Right the First Time (2005).

But most important to John during this time: he met his wife, Robin, and they started a family together. While many couples have romantic stories of their first meeting, John and Robin liked to joke their “meet cute” was…less cute: they met at a bar. Specifically, The British Bankers Club in Menlo Park, California. John would later joke that was the most expensive drink of his life. They wed in 1984 at St. Helena Catholic Church, with a reception at Meadowood in Napa Valley; three days before their wedding, ominously, the resort burnt down, leading radio DJ Don Bleu of “Don Bleu in the Morning” to dedicate an entire morning of his show for people to call in with suggestions to help John and Robin find a new venue. Luckily this wasn’t a foreshadowing of their marriage: Sunday, May 26 will be John and Robin’s 40th wedding anniversary. And we consulted with the umpire, who is calling this slide into home plate for John “Safe!” in celebrating the milestone (John loved baseball).

John and Robin have two sons, Christopher and Matthew, and raised their family in Los Altos Hills, California, where they lived for over 40 years. John kept his offices in downtown Los Altos so that he could see his family as much as possible; the children would always stop by after school for a snack and a “hello!” to their Dad. John liked to joke that his commute doubled if he got a red light at Foothill Express-way; perhaps you remember him driving in his convertible - top down, even when it was entirely too cold for that. John and his other Dad friends - Milt McColl, John Burr - loved coaching their childrens’ baseball teams. In Los Altos’ “highly competitive” 10-12 year old baseball landscape, their teams were famous for losing, because they always put an emphasis on having fun with friends and team bonding over winning.

John was fortunate enough to see both of his children partner off (to Matthew Sargenti and Jen Maples, respectively), and even got to meet his first grandchild, Lenny John, born in 2020 - whom he and Robin adore.

But let’s not ignore the end of the story. John was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 57, but he probably had it much earlier (he lost his sense of smell at 40, which is an early indicator for the disease). Parkinson’s is a tough, slow disease. He died from Parkinson’s, but like all Parkinson’s patients, it was actually from complications due to Parkinson’s; in his case, a fall that he wasn’t able to bounce back from. He hated falling, not because of the physical pain, but that it made him feel like a burden. But he was never a burden: even in those darker moments, the only thing we ever saw was his quick wit and strong sense of humor.

But we’re glad he won’t have to fall again.

Darryl Hickman, who appeared in such films as The Grapes of Wrath and Leave Her to Heaven as a youngster before becoming a CBS executive in charge of daytime drama and an actor once more, has died. He was 92.

Mr. Hickman, who lived in Montecito, Calif., had been treated for Parkinson's disease.

He was the older brother (by three years) of the late Dwayne Hickman, who starred on the 1959-63 CBS comedy The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Darryl appeared with his brother in Captain Eddie (1945) — he played famed fighter pilot Eddie Rickenbacker as a boy — and on three first-season episodes of Dobie as older brother Davey, who came home from college.

In 1951, after appearances in more than 40 movies, Hickman — who had been a contract player at Paramount and MGM — became disillusioned with the business and entered a monastery, though he was back in show business before long.

Hickman had made his first movie appearance in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and had one line of dialogue in If I Were King (1938) before he sang and tap-danced in The Star Maker (1939), starring Bing Crosby.

Bing’s brother, Everett Crosby, became his agent and got Hickman an interview with director John Ford, who was casting the part of Winfield, the youngest member of the Joad family, in an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl classic The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

About 100 kids were brought in to try for the role. Asked why he gave Hickman the job, Ford replied, “He was the only kid that didn’t act like an actor.” Hickman said he had a great time during production “riding around on the top of that truck on Route 66 with Shirley Mills” (she played his sister, Ruthie).

In the Technicolor film noir classic Leave Her to Heaven (1945), directed by John M. Stahl, Hickman stood out as the disabled younger brother of Cornel Wilde who drowns in a lake as the callous Gene Tierney looks on.

Hickman also played younger versions of Ira Gershwin (Robert Alda) and Van Heflin’s Sam Masterson in Rhapsody in Blue (1945) and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), respectively; was a mentally slow child in the wartime melodrama The Human Comedy (1943); and starred as the son of a gambling-house owner (Clark Gable) in Any Number Can Play (1949).

He had a year-plus stint on Broadway, taking over for Robert Morse as J. Pierrepont Finch in the original production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which ran from 1961-65.

Hickman also appeared in Paddy Chayefsky’s acclaimed Network (1976) as a West Coast TV executive and in the Burt Reynolds-starrer Sharky’s Machine (1981) as a cop who turns bad.

Darryl Gerard Hickman was born in Los Angeles on July 28, 1931, the son of an insurance salesman. He was discovered by one of his father’s clients, Ethel Meglin, a former Ziegfeld girl who presided over Meglin’s Kiddies, a troupe of young performers.

After The Grapes of Wrath, Hickman appeared with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney in Men of Boys Town (1941) and in the Our Gang comedy Going to Press (1942). In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), his character, the scalawag Johnny Tevis, says: “Tootie, if you don’t hit Mr. Braukoff in the face with flour and say, ‘I hate you,’ the Banshee will haunt you forever!”

Hickman graduated from Cathedral High School in Los Angeles in 1948, dated Elizabeth Taylor, appeared in A Kiss for Corliss (1949) — he had also acted on the radio show — and, after his short stay in a monastery, enrolled at Loyola University.

He made his living during the 1950s primarily by guest-starring on TV shows including The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Perry Mason, Climax!, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, Studio One in Hollywood and Tales of Wells Fargo.

Hickman wrote for NBC’s The Loretta Young Show in 1961 and also starred that year as a Union solder on a short-lived series for the network, The Americans.

In the 1970s in New York, Hickman worked as a producer on the CBS soap opera Love of Life (then starring a young Christopher Reeve as bad boy Ben Harper) and spent about five years in charge of the network’s daytime programming.

He came back to Los Angeles in 1977 to produce A Year at the Top, a sitcom from Norman Lear‘s TAT Communications that starred Paul Shaffer. He also taught acting, did voice work on Jonny Quest and other cartoons and appeared on Baywatch and The Nanny.

In 2006, Hickman appeared on Turner Classic Movies, where, along with other former child actors Margaret O’Brien (his Meet Me in St. Louis co-star), Dickie Moore and Jane Withers, he was interviewed by the late Robert Osborne. “I’ve had 12 psychiatrists and it cost me $85,000 to be able to sit here with some degree of sanity,” he said.

Hickman’s book about acting, The Unconscious Actor: Out of Control, In Full Command, was published in 2007. He said he was greatly influenced by Tracy and director George Cukor after working with them in Keeper of the Flame (1942).

Hickman married actress Pamela Lincoln in 1960, whom he had met on the set of the Vincent Price horror film The Tingler (1959). A few years after they divorced, their youngest son, Justin, died by suicide in 1985.

You entered HaShem's Kingdom peacefully May 14, 2024 with Daniel and me at your side.  Born August 20, 1946 in Berea, OH, you were the eldest son of the late Charles W. Showalter, scientist with the Atomic Energy Commission, and Genevieve (Bullock) Showalter, mother, secretary and successful entrepreneur ("Gene's Costumes").  In your youth, you lived in many places, but considered yourself a "southern boy" from Oak Ridge, TN.  Armed with a BA in history From Lehigh University and two masters degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, you set out to live your life.  In addition to your parents, you were predeceased by former first wife Barbara (Remen) Showalter.  You are survived by spouse Paula D'Auria-Showalter and Spinel, our black lab mix (Pioneertown, CA); brothers Bradley A. (Nancy) Showalter (Phoenix, AZ) and Jonathan L. (Loris Gielczyk) Showalter (Santa Cruz, CA); sons Charles W. Showalter III (Pittsburgh, PA) and Daniel J. (Patricia Hredzak) Showalter (Verona, PA); grandchildren Heather, Gwendolyn ("Winnie"), "Jack Jack" and several nieces. Interment will take place at the Tower of David,  Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Cathedral City, CA. Memorial contributions may be made to the Parkinson's Resource Organization (parkinsonsresource.org) and to the American Heart Association.  

You were employed, among other positions, as an assistant buyer  for Gimbel's Pittsburgh (furniture and bedding), an educator (Pittsburgh yeshiva) and as an alcohol/drug therapist (Aleutian Tribes Corp. in Cold Bay, AK).  Strongly feeling the need to help the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, you actively volunteered assisting the Pittsburgh homeless and worked as a trauma counselor.  A member of the Morongo Basin Democratic Club, the Morongo Basin CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) and the Morongo Basin Sexual Assault Services, you dedicated your life to giving back.  You enjoyed contributing as a volunteer educator for Desert Oasis Health Care, teaching the "Healthier Living Workshop" and "A Matter of Balance" classes with your wife.  "Well, hello there!" Who could resist that effervescent personality and smile as you strolled into the classroom sporting your red straw fedora and carrying your book bag?  Into politics, you proudly recounted being beaten by Chicago police while demonstrating during the 1968 Democratic convention.  Faith was extremely important to you as a member of Chabad of Rancho Mirage and Temple Isaiah Palm Springs.

A devoted follower of Bill and Dr. Bob, you were fond of saying, "The only meeting you need to attend is the one you don't want to."  Being of service to others was paramount in your life.  You established the Yucca Valley "House of Hope", a sober living house for women, and a housecleaning service, "Aaprons, the fine arts of housewifery", which you later paid it forward to those in recovery. A voracious reader especially of Civil War and WW II history, you visited all of the eastern and southern Civil War battlefields with Danny, enjoyed all types of music (playing the flute, piccolo and recorder) and were an eclectic art collector.  You enthusiastically waved the "Terrible Towel" at every chance for the Pittsburgh Steelers, your favorite football team in good and bad years.  You were witty, intelligent and creative.  You designed greeting cards, were always writing and researching topics of interest and constantly curious about the world.  More than once you only half-jokingly declared that anyone would want you on their Trivial Pursuit team.  We met in the fall of 1997 through a tiny " dwm seeking d/swf" ad placed in a village rag.  You were selling Alaska, and I was buying.  We corresponded and by Pesach 1998, I traveled to Cold Bay, AK to accept your proposal.  Back in PA, I sold my home and its contents, secured a position as Home Health Director for tiny native Kanakanak Hospital and moved to Dillingham, AK.  On July 9, 1998 we were married by the Court.  You were miffed that we married in the morning. We shared wedding cake with Yupi'k Native Americans by noon and by afternoon I returned to work!  We were amateur rock hounds.  While other couples had a favorite song, our favorite "rock" was labradorite.