People...People Who Need People

We check into the hotel. Uneventful.

We park the car. We schlep our stuff into the hotel room. We get coffee. We head to the Metro.

Good grief. Idiots on parade.

Who gets to the bottom of a mile long escalator and just stops to get their bearings while countless people young and old with varying degrees of agility and sometimes using walkers or pushing strollers run into each other in some kind of cartoonish pile up not unlike a playground game called Squeeze the Lemon?

It is the train platform, ladies and gentlemen! The train only goes one way! It stops. You get on. There is not a lot to get a handle on.

Scott and I get on the next train and are headed for the National Museum for the History of Crime and Punishment. I can hardly wait. It is a fascinating place.

Medieval punishment - thumb screws, iron masks. Yikes.

Bonnie and Clyde. A lovely, however grisly, love story. Though the real Clyde looked nothing like Warren Beatty.

Unsolved crimes. It's astonishing how much better at this criminals have gotten since the hamhanded ways of the the mob have proven not to be very effective.

We sit down and are immediately struck by the antics of a family nearby. The matriarch had the most enormous pair of front teeth I have ever seen protruding from a human head. Made more noticeable by the fact that the two that are supposed to be on either side of them were long gone. And the fact that she had a nervous tick where she made a repetitious gnawing gesture that reminded me of Charlotte’s gerbil Daisy from when we were kids.

An the guy at the pub that I noticed while I was obediently following the very informative signs which read “This way to the Toilets.” He had on a regular T-shirt. Athletic shoes. Had a camera around his neck .

Was wearing a kilt.

Not other kilt-wearers milling about.

No telltale bagpipes.

I wondered if he was just a regular guy having some curiosity about cross dressing and was giving it a test drive.


Or the man who approached the Security line at the Old Post Office (it is DC – all your bags have to be checked and metal detectors make sure that gun-toting, belt-wearing, jewelry-laden folks are all appropriately detained).

When seeing the line of us fifteen deep seeking entrance and waiting to be called in in groups of 5, he walked up to the heavy wooden door, pushed it open and walked right in.

Only to be shouted at by the scanning, metal-detecting, bag-searching people whose idea it was to keep the door shut in the first place. They were mighty upset.

Did he think we were all waiting there secretly chanting “Open sesame?” Did he really think we’d all missed the clues? “Oh Right! I can open the door myself! Duh!”

But they all paled in comparison to the high comedy that was the lively little pub we patronized later that night.