President Trump’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has left the building nearly empty. So the few lonely staff members who remain ahead of a potential two-year closure this month for renovations are prone to sharing tales of what for 50 years has made the place special.
Like the mice.
Kennedy Center mice do not resemble the typical gray house mice found in fields and woods in warmer weather and in kitchens and attics when it’s cold. They are roughly half that size, with large ears and fur of a golden tan color that, if they were horses, would be called palomino. Their bellies are pearl white.
For years stagehands have spotted a tan mouse — or maybe alternating mice — sitting motionless beneath a wheelchair ramp facing one of the center’s two Millennium Stages, seemingly watching the evening shows. Over the holidays in 2024, the mice devoured a fancy charcuterie board that the cast of the Broadway musical “& Juliet” left out overnight in the Opera House.
The mice have also nosed their way into reviews of Kennedy Center performances. In 2018, what The Washington Post called a “baby mouse” lingered in the Concert Hall during a National Symphony Orchestra performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini.” The mouse ran for the prime seats near the stage and “scurried around 12 or more rows near the left aisle, forcing audience members to move their coats and bags as they struggled to remain quiet and still,” a Post arts reporter, Peggy McGlone, wrote.
In May, Oussama Zahr noted in his New York Times review of the symphony’s concert version of Puccini’s “Il Trittico” that a mouse “scampered through the orchestra seats, startling some audience members.”
An usher told Mr. Zahr that of course the center’s mice were drawn to the Italian masterwork. Puccini runs in their blood.
The Legend Begins
In the quiet of the center’s Grand Foyer last month, four stagehands paused from cleaning the rigging over the idled Millennium Stage to share the story of the mice.
The Kennedy Center was built as a living memorial to the slain President John F. Kennedy, a patron of the arts who championed its construction. Amid a surge of grief and tribute after his assassination in 1963, more than 60 nations donated furnishings and artwork to the center rising on the Potomac.
The largest of these gifts came from Italy: 3,700 tons of dazzling white Carrara marble for the facade and interior walls, specially mined in Tuscany’s Apuan Alps, in the same area as the marble for Michelangelo’s David. The region is home to the Alpine field mouse and its genetic kin.
For decades Kennedy Center workers have insisted that a few of these Italian rodents traveled to Washington in the late 1960s, nestled in crates carrying the marble shipments.
“We’ve talked to the pest guys that come through and set all the mousetraps and they’re like, ‘This is the only place in D.C. that has these,’” said Thomas Benya, the head electrician in the Eisenhower Theater, referring to the tiny tan mice.
The pest guys work at a contractor called American Pest, which declined to comment.
The marble was unpacked and installed between 1968 and 1970, and legend holds that descendants of the Carrara stowaways have been living large in the performing arts center ever since.
“The person who told me the story was a stagehand who was here for the opening of this place,” said Annemarie Mountjoy, the chief electrician in the Opera House.
Early last year, Colleen Shannon, who handles lighting in the center’s Family Theater, captured a fleeting image of a reddish tan mouse with her phone, and the stagehands nicknamed it Skittles. This spring, “I had one run across my console while I was running a show,” she said.
“They’re just cute as the dickens,” she said. “So tiny. The cockroaches are bigger.”
Staff members have swapped photos and tales of the mice for years, the stagehands said. Although Washington’s many universities and science and research institutions make it a virtual nest of mammalian expertise, no one they knew of had checked out the story.
From Italy, With Straw
Maurizio Bufalini ran a quarry in Carrara, Italy, that supplied marble for the Kennedy Center. The contract is a source of pride in the family, which has been in the stone business for more than 300 years. Mr. Bufalini’s son Alberto took over the business, now called Bufalini Marmi, after he died in 1998.
The Bufalinis have supplied marble to a number of notable American structures, including for the marble interior of the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. In the 1950s through the 1970s, Bufalini was a favored supplier of marble to structures designed by Edward Durell Stone, the Kennedy Center architect.
“Of course we have mice here” in the factory, Mr. Bufalini, 58, said in a phone interview last week.
In the late 1960s, the company quarried and packed the slabs of marble, each roughly 8 feet by 4 feet and 5 inches thick, into wooden shipping crates. Straw was used for cushioning. Each container held 2,200 to 3,300 pounds, meaning more than 3,000 crates of marble crossed the Atlantic headed for the Kennedy Center. The journey took from three weeks to a month.
In the wild the Alpine field mouse and its kin live on insects, plants and seeds, all potentially available in packing straw. It has adapted to its arid environment by extracting water from its food in a metabolic process that allows it to survive for long periods without drinking.
“When we import stone from other countries, for sure you can find insects or a little creature that has been trapped inside the container,” Mr. Bufalini said.
“It is a funny story, and it’s also possible but difficult to verify. You could see if the mice eat pasta or not.”
‘It Is Intriguing’
I took the case to Joel Sartore, who photographed the Alpine field mouse at the Czech Republic’s Plzen Zoo, famous for its rodent collection. Mr. Sartore is a photographer and founder of the Photo Ark, a National Geographic-supported effort to document all the planet’s animals. He works with a network of biologists to identify species he finds in the wild, and so he emailed Ms. Shannon’s photo of Skittles to Sandra Sneckenberger, a mouse specialist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She responded to Mr. Sartore within an hour. The blurry photo made it hard to tell whether the mouse is an Italian field mouse or the local, less exotic white-footed mouse.
“All we need is a skull of a dead one, to look at the teeth, though,” Ms. Sneckenberger wrote.
Mr. Sartore was game. “Maybe someone in maintenance there knows of one sitting on someone’s desk?” Mr. Sartore suggested. “Some folks love to save skulls for some reason. I see them of all sizes in zoo manager offices.”
Ian Millholland, an electrician in the Opera House who does double duty cleaning out the mouse traps, did not respond to a text message asking whether there were any skulls sitting on desks in the Kennedy Center.
Darrin Lunde, mammal collection manager at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, seemed like the best Washington expert to consult. He has documented more than a dozen new species, including two of the New Guinea water rat, and shed new light on hundreds more on expeditions he led in the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia.
“It’s a little far-fetched that only in the Kennedy Center do they have these mice,” he said upon hearing the story. “It’s like Big Foot. People want to believe in something special.”
Then he reviewed Ms. Shannon’s photo of Skittles.
“It is intriguing,” he said, noting the animal’s “orangey” color. “It’s much too small to be a white-footed mouse or a deer mouse from the local population.”
“If it’s anything interesting it’s going to be one of the three or four species of Apodemus living in Italy,” he added, using the Latin name for the mouse’s genus. “It does look like an Apodemus to me, but I’m not saying definitively that’s what it is.
“If we could get a specimen in hand, it’s not out of the question,” he said.
But back at the Kennedy Center the stagehands said the mice, like the people, had grown scarce. None appeared in the Eisenhower Theater break room one day last month, despite a full trash bin. The Family Theater, Skittles’s haunt, was likewise quiet.
Last month, Mr. Millholland checked the traps. Empty. Referring to the delectable missing bait in some of them, “They know how to chew off the peanut butter,” he said.
Maybe the story of the mice, treasured lore in a place with an uncertain future, would wind up too difficult to prove. Or too good to check.
“I don’t want to know,” Ms. Shannon said.
Dylan Freedman contributed research from Washington.
