BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Capitol Steps (two appearances)

DC -- Capitol Steps (two appearances):

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Description of Pictures: I saw this group twice this year:
(070112) With Margot -- her Christmas present to me,
(070118) Less than a week later as a component of the Gallup event I went to

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.141.8.247 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] STEPS_070112_01.JPG	[2] STEPS_070112_07.JPG	[3] STEPS_070112_09.JPG
[4] STEPS_070116_021.JPG	[5] STEPS_070116_027.JPG	[6] STEPS_070116_030.JPG
[7] STEPS_070116_034.JPG	[8] STEPS_070116_040.JPG	[9] STEPS_070116_058.JPG
[10] STEPS_070116_061.JPG	[11] STEPS_070116_071.JPG	[12] STEPS_070116_076.JPG
[13] STEPS_070116_093.JPG	[14] STEPS_070116_112.JPG	[15] STEPS_070116_121.JPG
[16] STEPS_070116_124.JPG	[17] STEPS_070116_125.JPG	[18] STEPS_070116_128.JPG
[19] STEPS_070116_134.JPG	[20] STEPS_070116_141.JPG	[21] STEPS_070116_156.JPG
[22] STEPS_070116_159.JPG	[23] STEPS_070116_162.JPG	[24] STEPS_070116_168.JPG
[25] STEPS_070116_175.JPG	[26] STEPS_070116_178.JPG	[27] STEPS_070116_180.JPG
[28] STEPS_070116_192.JPG	[29] STEPS_070116_197.JPG	[30] STEPS_070116_201.JPG
[31] STEPS_070116_208.JPG	[32] STEPS_070116_212.JPG	[33] STEPS_070116_218.JPG
[34] STEPS_070116_220.JPG	[35] STEPS_070116_229.JPG	[36] STEPS_070116_233.JPG
[37] STEPS_070116_240.JPG	[38] STEPS_070116_247.JPG	[39] STEPS_070116_252.JPG
[40] STEPS_070116_254.JPG	[41] STEPS_070116_263.JPG	[42] STEPS_070116_267.JPG
[43] STEPS_070116_272.JPG	[44] STEPS_070116_290.JPG	[45] STEPS_070116_294.JPG
[46] STEPS_070116_304.JPG	[47] STEPS_070116_307.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. STEPS_070112_01.JPG: Margot Lebow
2. STEPS_070112_09.JPG: Margot Lebow with some of the Capitol Steps cast
Wikipedia Description: Capitol Steps
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Capitol Steps is an American political satire group. It has been performing since 1981, and has released approximately thirty albums consisting primarily of song parodies. The group marked its twenty-fifth anniversary during 2006. Originally consisting exclusively of Congressional staffers performing around Washington, D.C., the troupe has also performed on PBS, public radio and through concert tours around the United States.

History:

The Reagan years:

In 1981, two Republican Congressional staffers, Bill Strauss and Elaina Newport, used their spare time while working for the Senate Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, and Government Processes for the Senate Committee of Governmental Affairs to sing song parodies about current events. They were joined by other Republican Senate staffers Nancy Baskin, Barbie Granzow, and Dave Nichols. Together they decided to put on a Christmas show as their first performance, while continuing to work full-time as Congressional staffers. They chose the name "The Capitol Steps" for their group based on a sex scandal earlier that year, in which then-Congressman John Jenrette had trysted with his wife, Rita, on the steps of the Capitol building.

The first show took place on December 11, 1981, at a Christmas party for the Foreign Relations Committee. They deemed the show a success, and performed several more times that month with the same songs. In 1982, the group expanded to include several more members, including House staffers and Democrats. Despite being predominantly Republican, they made a concerted effort to make their shows bipartisan, trying to incorporate a roughly even mix of Democratic and Republican songs. They achieved media interest at this time, but refused all interviews on the grounds that their jobs could be endangered by press coverage of their satirical antics. They were also concerned about how their behavior might reflect on the chair of Strauss and Newport's subcommittee, Senator Charles H. Percy.

In February 1983, the Capitol Steps began to do monthly performances at the Shoreham Hotel, opening themselves to publicity for the first time. They received a favorable review in the Washington Post, and their performances became highly successful. In November of 1984, they performed at Senator Percy's election night party. During the party, they learned that the senator had lost, meaning that Strauss and Newport would lose their jobs working for him. Shortly after, they decided to make the Capitol Steps a professional group. They recorded their first album shortly after: The Capitol Steps--Live! at the Shoreham.

Three years later, in 1987, the group members finally decided to quit their full-time jobs. At this time, the group included David Gencarelli, Richard Paul, Anne Hill, Ann Schmitt, Brian Ash, and Mike Loomis, all of whom (except Gencarelli) are with the group, along with Strauss and Newport, as of 2006. In September of 1988, the group performed at the White House, in front of an audience that included President Ronald Reagan, his wife Nancy, and hundreds of members of Congress. Reagan, through an aide, requested that the group only perform songs poking fun at him. The group obliged, and Reagan enjoyed the show immensely.

The Capitol Steps released a total of five albums during Reagan's years in office. In 1988, they sang a song entitled "76 Unknowns" about the vast and, in their opinion, lackluster variety of candidates for the presidential election. This was accompanied by an album entitled "76 Bad Loans".

The George H. W. Bush years:

With the election of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988, the Capitol Steps expanded their repertoire of material to include new foreign policy, such as the United States invasion of Panama, as well as local gaffes, such as Bush's declaration of September 7 as Pearl Harbor Day. The group also achieved notoriety for their portrayal of Vice President Dan Quayle, particularly after his famous mistake of correcting a child's spelling of "potato" by encouraging him to add an e.

The Capitol Steps released six albums during this presidency. They also performed for Bush Sr.'s White House several times. On three occasions, he accepted the group's invitations to sing songs about his minor gaffes along with them on stage.

The Clinton years:

Prior to the Lewinsky scandal, the Bill Clinton administration provided several scandals that turned into a multitude of new songs and albums, as well as a wide variety of personalities that were easy to exaggerate: the easy-going Clinton, his aggressive wife Hillary, the boring Al Gore, and several colorful others in the administration, including Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who recommended that masturbation be mentioned in schools as a means of suppressing teen pregnancy.

In 1994, the group performed at the White House in front of both Clinton and Gore. However, after the Lewinsky scandal broke, they were not invited to perform at the White House again, as their humor (like that of most American comedians of the time) focused on allegations of Clinton's womanizing and then covering it up. They did, however, perform for Kenneth Starr's law firm.

The presidential election of 2000 provided plenty of fodder for humor, including a frustrated song just before the election, "I Want a Brand New Pair of Candidates," and several songs about the recount fiasco afterward.

The George W. Bush years:

The popular conception of George W. Bush possessing an inferior intellect, based primarily on his frequent grammatical errors in speeches, allowed the Capitol Steps to reuse much of their Dan Quayle material. Additionally, they enjoyed exaggerating his right-wing tendencies, and the perceived sinisterness of much of his administration, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

However, after the events of September 11, 2001, jokes aimed at the president, or at American politics, no longer seemed funny to the group. They cancelled most of their performances for the next few weeks, but did perform an edited show at a nightclub on September 15. The show went well, and the group soon found new material that people in October of 2001 would find funny, including poking fun at how much the public's opinion of President Bush had improved, and at personalities that were now becoming more relevant to the American public, including New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and French President Jacques Chirac. Soon the extremely heightened security nationwide also became a popular subject for comedians, as well as the Steps, as media reports came in that people were being interrogated in airports for having the powder from a donut on them. By the end of 2001, the Steps were once again singing songs about nearly everything, even poking fun at Arab terrorists.

In 2002 and 2003, their material skewered SUVs and their drivers, Hans Blix, the collapse of Enron, the standoff with Saddam Hussein, Condoleezza Rice, Democratic candidates very early on in the process for the 2004 election, the capture of Saddam Hussein, same-sex weddings, the Kobe Bryant trial, and the California gubernatorial recall election, in which they quickly reused a regular parody of the Clinton years: The Wanderer redone as The Fondler but this time with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the accused.

Since 2004, the Steps have remained topical with their parodies, releasing songs about such topics as the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, U.S. immigration reform law proposals, scandals involving Tom DeLay, and others.

Routines:

The bulk of the Capitol Steps' material is in the form of parodies of well-known songs, usually introduced with a short skit. These songs are interspersed with other routines, including a spoonerism routine entitled "Lirty Dies" that the group generally includes near the end of each performance, running through recent scandals while making numerous innuendos.

The Steps do not have to get permission or pay royalties for the parodies of copyrighted songs that they perform, due to the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in 1993 on the case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., which established that political parody qualifies as fair use, even if the parodies are profitable. Thus, unlike non-political parody artists such as "Weird Al" Yankovic (who submitted an amicus curiae brief opposing such a fair use concept), the Capitol Steps are under no financial pressure to reduce the percentage of copyrighted song parodies in their acts. The Capitol Steps also submitted an amicus curiae for the case, as well as a cassette tape explaining the history of political parody in America. This was mentioned in the book Sixteen Scandals.

Current status:

As of 2007, the Steps consist of 26 cast members and four pianists. They perform public and private shows year round all over the country. They also appear at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, DC, every weekend.

On December 18, 2007, one of the Capitol Steps co-founders, Bill Strauss, died at his home in McLean, Virginia after a long illness.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Featured Folk: Some of the people here can also be seen on other pages on this site.
- Capitol Steps (comedy group) appears on:
  - 2005_DC_Steps_050427 DC -- Capitol Steps @ Cognos Expo
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].