Discomfort Zone

Multi-tasking clearly comes easily to Seaver, 29. He has helmed restaurant kitchens across the District (most recently at Hook in Georgetown) and now has his hands in a couple of pots: a cookbook and the seafood sustainability movement. To be honest, finding something out of this Dupont Circle resident's comfort zone sent me into needle-in-haystack territory. (As with Bland, his parents were into him keeping him active and, ahem, away from the TV.)

Seaver seems so at home with the artistic task, I ask him whether painting is like cooking. Indeed. "You have the raw materials in front of you and apply techniques to it, hoping for a result that you were aiming for," he says.

Ninety minutes later, he has a fairly impressive representation of his sunflower, though he did take artistic license, changing the brown stem to a mossy green.

"I think the key to accomplishing anything is humbling yourself to the goal, not to the process," he says. "Art is no longer as daunting to me as it was."

So much so that it's his new hobby. Last we spoke, Seaver's girlfriend had bought him paints of his own, and he planned to attempt a portrait of her.

Keep up with Seaver's projects at www.bartonseaver.org.

Paint! Dana Ellyn Studio, 916 G St. NW. 202-737-6161. http://www.dcpaintingclasses.com. $50 (includes materials) for a two-hour session with a six-class commitment.

Drag Queen at the Drag Races

"Lots of noise. That's what I'm talking about!" Jeffrey Johnson is almost giddy as he cheers on a burgundy speedster splitting eardrums at the starting line of the Capitol Raceway in Crofton. It might seem like a stretch, but the drag queen, actor and artistic director of Ganymede Arts, the District's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered arts company, is kind of at home sitting on the blistering hot aluminum bleachers watching Marylanders with mullets zip their pimped-out rides down the track.

"It reminded me a lot of my childhood, and the people that were there were kind of reminding me of the people I grew up with," Johnson, 40, who lives in Dupont Circle, says later. He was a record-holding swimmer in New York state before turning in his Speedo and goggles for the fuchsia wig and four-inch stilettos worn by his alter ego, drag queen Special Agent Galactica.

On this day Johnson decides to forgo the fashions favored by Galactica.

"If I was sitting there in a tiny little dress and a bunch of make up, I would have been uncomfortable. One, because it was hot, and two, because that would just be a little too odd," he says. Generally it takes a truly bizarre experience for him to be daunted, like the time he judged a drag queen competition that ended in a nail-file brawl.

But did he like the drag racing? Yep, he actually did. "I've never done anything like that before," he says. "It was really cool to see what it's all about. You see it on TV, but it's a different experience in person."