Mouseland: Part 1

“What’s that clicking noise?” Geoff asked.

“That,” Greg intoned darkly, “is their mouths moving.”

“Oh, shit.”  We looked around.  We were floating on a rudderless craft through a chamber of creaking robotic dolls, all singing the same song.  Incessantly.  Their torsos pivoted back and forth.  Their eyelids lurched up and down. 

“It’s a small world after all…”

“I wouldn’t come in here after dark,” Geoff made sure we knew.

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The plaques on the double archways into Disneyland say, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.” 

It’s an inspiring message: I can’t pass through those brick tunnels without getting a giddy spring in my step.  I would, however, like to amend the statement to: “Here you leave normalcy, and enter the realm of scent-sprayers, green-dyed water, and Robot Lincoln.”

Many of my best memories, childhood and otherwise, were made at Disneyland.  There was the time I took the “What Disney character are you most like?” quiz, and learned that, while I most resemble the bookish Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Greg is most like that same film’s hairy-chested, narcissistic, scheming antagonist, Gaston.  There was the time, waiting in line for the Haunted Mansion, that Mom kept insisting the crow on top of the building was a “Disney crow”—meaning an animatronic figurine.  She was adamant about it, up until the bird took off into the sky.

Writing this, I was searching for a way to describe how much my parents like Disneyland.  Greg stared at me, jaw agape.  It’s true: examples aren’t exactly scarce.  My parents own Disney key chains, Disney refrigerator magnets, Disney potholders, Disney soup spoons, Disney coffee mugs, Disney music, Disney jackets, Disney ponchos, and Disney Trivial Pursuit.  I’ve suspected for a while that, whenever either of them needs a new sweatshirt, they wait to buy it until their next trip to the domain of Mickey Mouse.

I’ve been down all the alleys of Main Street.  I’ve ridden in the Captain’s Quarters of the Mark Twain riverboat.  I even went to the elusive and overpriced Club 33—but you’ll have to wait for Part 2 of this post to learn about that.

That withered fellow who plays the banjo at the beginning of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, rocking on the porch of his swamp-shanty for eternity?  I greet him like an old friend.

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My parents have been to Disneyland so many times that Dad has staked out spots where he can take midday naps.  The first of these is the Enchanted Tiki Room (it’s not exactly a thrill ride), and the second is “It’s a Small World After All.”

Or, as I call it, the Hall of Stereotypes.

Don’t get me wrong: when I was a kid, I thought the ride was delightful.  The famous title ditty was written in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It’s the only Disney tune never copyrighted, intended as “a gift to the children of the world.”  I loved the colorful, bobble-headed creatures that pass for juveniles in Small World, and I loved learning which dolls represented which areas of Earth.

In 2009, though, Disneyland revamped its crown jewel.  Now, Ireland is represented by little jigging leprechauns, complete with four-leaf clovers on their hats.  There’s a barn where blonde, corn-fed Americans stack hay, across from Woody and Buzz Lightyear.  The entire Hawaii section has been reduced to the characters Lilo and Stitch, riding a surfboard.  Pinocchio grins in Italy, Cinderella hangs out in France (which is odd, because I have no recollection of that movie being set in France), and Alice, Peter Pan, and Tinkerbell dominate what used to be an impressive reproduction of London’s Big Ben.

Okay—so Small World was never free from ethnic stereotyping.  But at least it didn’t lump Australia, Polynesia, and the Caribbean into one room, presided over by Ariel, the little mermaid. 

Until now.

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Carmen taught me a perfect word to describe what I love most about Disneyland: “retro-futurism.”

The word seems pretty self-explanatory: retro-futurism refers to people of the past’s notions of the future.  It’s important to remember that, at the time it was founded, Disneyland was a manifestation of how Americans envisioned the glorious technological age to come.  One former Disneyland attraction was called the “The Carousel of Progress.”  Another was (I kid you not) “The Bathroom of Tomorrow.”  Yet another once-upon-a-time ride was a completely plastic house, which displayed such outlandish modern machines as, say, dishwashers.

Hints of the Golden Age of science fiction are everywhere in the park.  Example: the train ride announces its destinations in the voice of Robbie the Robot, from the kitschy SF classic Forbidden Planet. 

And yes, Disney’s idea of the future bears a keen resemblance to the world of the Jetsons…  But I’m completely certain that my lifelong passion for robots (not to mention time machines) started right there, in Tomorrowland.

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Last Spring, when Greg and I went with our friends Geoff and Evan (and after we discovered Geoff’s nascent fear of partially-humanized mechanics), we decided, at the end of the day, to slip over to the neighboring park of California Adventure.  We were a little flummoxed by the huge line of people waiting to get through the gates: as Greg says, California Adventure is Disneyland’s “half-constructed backyard.”  Anaheim’s tribute to the Golden State is kind of like the magazine rack in the dentist’s office: you go there because you can, and, well, what the heck.  Nothing else is taking your time. 

            We moseyed, shuffle by shuffle, into the park.  Finally through the turnstiles, I was brought up short by a crowd of women with strollers, all facing different directions and looking confused.  Greg stopped beside me, and together, we looked up. 

That day, we learned of the wonder that is “elecTRONica.”

A central platform, with DJs surrounded by club-style dancers in flashing white or black body suits.  Throbbing rave music.  $12 cups of (glowing) mojitos.  Strobe lights.  Mixed signals.

Sandwiched between a Monsters, Inc. ride and an attraction based on the Muppets, elecTRONica is a huge and nightly event stemming from Disney’s remake of the film Tron.  Considering the dubious merits of Tron, I almost think that Disney remade the movie just so it could host the flashy shindig.  ElecTRONica is wonderfully innocent.  Anachronistic.  Confounding. 

I danced.

To be continued…

My Favorite Place in Orange County

            My favorite place in Orange County is not, as one might suspect, Disneyland.  No: it’s an overpass above the Pacific Coast Highway.  On one side of it, the beach and the ocean; on the other, a Mexican restaurant once frequented by Richard Nixon.  The overpass itself is a mesh cage.

            Climbing above the road, I always stop directly over a strip of brown train tracks that run parallel to the highway.  These stretch as far as the human eye can see in either direction, sandwiched between clumps of hairy palm trees, the ocean, the road, and mottled cliffs.  Part of me is astounded every time, at the pure linearity of the sight—a kind of symmetry nobody two hundred years ago would've ever seen.

            And the Pacific Coast Highway: the Pacific Coast Highway, Route 1, is an old road, built in the era before freeways--the era when movie stars with aviator sunglasses drove their convertibles north for weekend escapes.  Winding along coastal cliffs, there’s history in the cement.  There’s glamor in the growing cracks.

Something about this place, this overpass next to the Mexican restaurant once frequented by Richard Nixon, feels very real, to me.  Seagulls wait on the waterline, staring in ominous masses out to sea.  Pelicans bob in the swilling Pacific, beaks submerged.  Kelp decays in stinking piles underfoot.  Perpetually parked RVs with “Lazy Daze” and “Hooked on Jesus” painted on the sides dangle their rear ends over the sand. 

I once picked up a white stone from this beach.  It was an illegal acquisition, and I still have it in the pocket of my favorite jacket.  The stone is a lumpy quartz that smelled like the sea for weeks, and still has the texture of salt—as if its surface is riddled with microscopic holes. 

I called it my “pocket rock.”  It’s ancient, and I carry it with me.

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California: California is a world, in itself.  For a long time, I felt as if I’d never escape it, never find my way beyond its boundaries.  It’s a big state: when Greg and I took a bus from New York City to Philadelphia, we crossed through all of New Jersey in exactly the same amount of time it takes to get from the San Francisco Airport to my house.

            California: home of the lowest and the highest points in the continental U.S.  Home of John Steinbeck, wine country, hippies, redwoods, starlets, film noir, saloons, In‘n’Out Burger, the Mojave Desert, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

California has pyramids of wine barrels next to gravel roads with “Water into Wine?  Go Jesus!” sprayed across them.

            I’ve heard many people say that Northern and Southern California should become separate states.  It might be true: driving down the coast calls, at about the site of Hearst Castle, for a paradigm shift.  To the north is the Bay Area and above, where the 101 narrows down to a byway through forests, where tie-dye’s always kind of in fashion, where nonconformity is a standard value.  To the south, the 101 grows into a great conglomeration of asphalt and steel, and billboards of the latest action movies span the lanes.  All of L.A. opens up before the driver, a million white lights in a dark desert.

            Going even farther south, past the great and historically corrupt metropolis, the corporate buildings even into houses.  The road widens.  That’s Orange County.  Orange County is L.A.’s well-trimmed goatee.

Orange County is the quintessential postmodern landscape: everything is planned and controlled.  The trees are in manicured hedges, the parks have toll booths, and the hobos are moved along to less affluent areas.  Nature, in any wild form, usually has to sneak in--like when rats nested in the engine of Greg's car.
I once had a character, a young rebel, call Orange County “Beigeland.”  In the gated community where Greg’s family lives, it’s against the rules to paint houses anything but variations of brown.  Greg's parents' house, in this setting, is unique: it's distinctly more brown than the others.

Consumerism, down here, is the great recreation.  In one of the shiniest and most expensive malls, South Coast Plaza, the clothing store Abercrombie and Fitch pays an actual man to stand in its entrance, wearing stylish jeans and no shirt.  He always looks embarrassed, and a little cold.

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            Greg goes to UC Irvine.  The other day, leaving campus, he noticed several police cars in the parking lot.  The police were practicing what they’d do in the event that student protesters seized the administration buildings.  With the current state of UC tuition (it’s slated to increase 16% every year for the next five years), it is likely that California will see many student protests in the near future.  Irvine, though, located in the heartland of big business, is the campus of acquiescence. 

It honestly doesn’t seem to have the same wackiness as other colleges, the same spontaneity.  At UC Santa Barbara, there were random people in banana costumes running around chased by costumed gorillas.  At Berkeley, my brother met someone called the Pink Man, who rode a unicycle and said “Ca-caw, ca-caw,” flapping his arms.  Irvine, Greg and I joke, is the campus of students saying, “O-kay,” to everything—not necessarily with enthusiasm.

There’s an outdoor mall called the Irvine Spectrum, nearby.  It has a Ferris wheel in the center, which, according to Greg’s brother, “no one ever rides.”  Greg and I rode it, once.  We were the only customers, and the operator glared at us every time we swooped down.

            Then again, the nights here are beautiful—wet, with jagged mountain silhouettes against the befogged twinkling of cities.  The palm trees make the shapes of tarantulas against the sky.

&

            Disneyland, now—Disneyland is the epitome of the non-real.  Disneyland is my second favorite place in Orange County.  I respect that theme park, even love it.  Where else could I buy a whole pickle after being serenaded by robotic bears?

Disneyland deserves its own chapter in my travelogue blog.  Au revoir, folks.  We'll meet up again in the Happiest Place on Earth.

A Little Bit About My Genre

I know at least one of my readers has been asking, “When will you talk about your own work?  When will you talk about science fiction?”

The time is now.  I’m lacing up my nerd shoes.  The chronometer is striking thirteen.

Let’s land on this planet.

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I write science fiction and fantasy (these are both encapsulated by the umbrella term “speculative fiction”, but umbrella terms, to my mind, are depressingly vague: I write science fiction and fantasy).  I have several short stories in online magazines, and many more in the making.  They talk about…well…robots and ballerinas.  The Scopes trial.  Hamlet.  Unicorns.  Imaginary detectives.  The train we might ride after death.

I’ve been on this road for a long time: I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was seven years old, and I never changed my mind.  This has, every once in a while, been a rather cantankerous thing to carry on my back.  I hit a period at the end of adolescence where I could only transcribe what happened to me, and that in only the most fragmented and self-depreciating manner.  I well remember that rage, the rage of not trusting the validity of anything I said.  The only solution was years of hard work, varied reading, and concentration.

I needed to learn to integrate my wacky subconscious with my equally wacky (but more plotting) conscious.  Now, here I am.  I just wrote a scene where a poet and a Shakespeare scholar talk about time machines in Las Vegas.

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Philip K. Dick said, “The true protagonist of a science fiction story is an idea.”

            This may be right.  One of science fiction’s first missions, (going back to when it lurked dark and squiggly in Jules Verne’s mind), was to hypothesize.  If there was a tunnel to the center of the Earth...

            If there was a world of humans without gender…

            If we found a planet with a sentient ocean…

            If a dissatisfied man could buy better dreams…

What I love about science fiction is the leap: you leap into a new reality, and then you imagine the ramifications of the change.  Also, SF is one of the most important genres of the modern world: the point of it is, after all, to think about science.  Since the results of the industrial revolution are rearranging both the quality and quantity of life on this ball of dirt, I think it has become quite pertinent to think about science.

Ideas, though, however well-articulated, get muddy when they’re expressed through the actions of characters.  And fiction is always about the actions of characters.  Characters: I love them even more than ideas.  I love it when someone has a largely inexplicable quirk, like wanting to wrap mountains in cellophane, or carrying a battered blue suitcase with them to an alien planet.

We could all vacation in Mordor if we wanted, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without Frodo and Sam.

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I was rereading Tom Robbins’ book Still Life with Woodpecker the other day, when I came across the line, “There are essential and inessential insanities.”  Robbins (wisely) doesn’t pin these down, only adding, “Inessential insanities get one in trouble with oneself.  Essential insanities get one in trouble with others.  It’s always preferable to be in trouble with others.”

My essential insanity is creativity.  My essential insanity is saying, “Yes, absurd and uncontrolled things come from my mind: I’m going to clear a space for them and consider their vast implications.”

Much of the human psyche is logical, but much of it is beyond (or below) that, working itself out through dreams, emotions, and sudden revelations.  What happens when these inner realities are forced to meet?  Well, they interweave and redefine each other.  Fiction is born from this entanglement.  The writer of fiction needs both analysis, and…we’ll call it “openness of mind”.

For example: In a story I wrote about six months ago (as yet unpublished), a character is sent back in time to the Cretaceous, the last and greatest age of the dinosaurs.  It is a permanent exile.  She meets another human there who’s suffered the same fate, and the first thing he says to her is, “You’re lucky.  You still get flowers.”

As the story explains, flowering plants didn’t evolve until that very Cretaceous, that twilight of dinosauria, where (when?) my character was stranded.  If she’d landed one millimeter further back on the timeline, her world would have been pinecones and ferns.  I knew this logically, from a paleontology class I took in college: but the line, with its perfect specificity and (dare I say) poetry, surprised me.  It bubbled up.

In the 1969 introduction to her classic The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that fiction attempts to say in words what cannot be said in words.  In other words (ha ha), the details of stories surpass summary.  They can by no means be broken, intact, down to ideas.

But the ideas need to be there.

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One idea I have is that the world can be just as uncontrolled, just as absurd, just as unbelievably symbolic as anything that comes from a writer’s mind.  The tag on my green tea bag (the brand I drink always prints famous quotes) just told me that Pancho Villa’s last words were,

“Don’t let it end like this.  Tell them I said something.”

And I want to say something to finish this post, something forthright, something concrete.  My best first shot was, “Enough of this.  Intergalactic Coffeeship away!”  Which didn’t seem to fit the tone.

Tone, however, is one thing I can control.  So let’s throw caution to the winds:

Enough of this.  Intergalactic…

Coffeeship…

                                                                                    Away!

Lost Coasting

The water was slate-gray, and from the back of the room it looked as if it rolled right under the hotel.  The horizon, where ocean met sky, was a strip of gunpowder black.  Sea-foam laced across the rocky shoreline.  Earlier that day, Greg had leaned against a cliff-top railing, pointed at the sea-foam, and asked, “Isn’t that dead mermaids?”

I laughed.  "Well—you're right.  The little mermaid does get turned to sea-foam, in the original story, when that prince guy won’t love her.  Jerk.”

We were on the Lost Coast.

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The Lost Coast is a stretch of terrain in Northern California’s Humboldt County that was depopulated during the Great Depression.  Because of the steep King Range Mountains, all major roads go around it.  As my parents, Greg and I found out, the only way to the Lost Coast is to drive (slowly) up a mountain, then drive (slowly) down a mountain, then curve (slowly) up another mountain, and then inch down it again.

Greg played the “Carnival of the Animals” while we descended into the fog.

While the Lost Coast wasn’t exactly lost (it was, after all, right where we expected it to be) it was some of the most beautiful country that I’ve ever seen by car.  Its natives: the coast Douglas-fir, the coast redwood, and the tanoak tree.  Every curve of the road was another ten seconds between us and the rest of the world.  The temporal barrier built—and it should be taken into account that here, the closest outposts of “the rest of the world” were the towns of Garberville and Redway, neither of which possessed a chain store.  (Garberville did, however, possess the One-Log House.  For a dollar each, we got to peek inside this edifice: a cabin built entirely from the felled and unsplintered trunk of a redwood.  The walls curved, but in the effort to make it historically accurate, shelves had been nailed up and packed with garlic and allspice.)

Our destination was Shelter Cove, a fishing village.  Topographically, Shelter Cove is a strip of cleared land at the base of tremendous cliffs, looking as if it’s about to be swallowed by the sea.  Its houses were weathered mansions, and its beaches were black sand.  The color comes from the high tectonic activity in the area: the Lost Coast is where the Pacific Plate, the North American Plate, and the Juan de Fuca Plate meet.

We ate breakfast at a cart called “Jam Buddies”, and lunch in a British-style teahouse where the menus were inside encyclopedias about nautical voyages.  Mine was called “The Atlantic Crossing,” and opened to an oil painting of the Mayflower. 

Outside, a pelican perched on a log, its saurian feet blending perfectly with the grain.  Its eyes were black and sleepy.  Mom and I came within a respectful four feet while it studied us, chest swelling and settling with breath.

The waves, thunderous waves, gathered themselves and then crashed against the rocks with drum-claps that rivaled sonic booms.  I heard them breaking through the night. 

It was my birthday.  I looked out the window of the hotel, the window that, from the back of the room, showed nothing but swilling gray water, and realized that I’d never written a story about the sea.

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The book you carry with you can color a trip.  With the right book, you can travel to two places at once: and the tension between where you are, and where the people in the book are, will lead to weird and illuminating thoughts.

I was on the Lost Coast, and I was reading a Lost Book: The Voyage That Never Ends, by Malcolm Lowry.  My copy of The Voyage that Never Ends says “Advance Uncorrected Proof: Not For Sale” on the cover.  This was the only paperback version I could find online.

            Malcolm Lowry was an author who lived in the Canadian wilderness in the first half of the twentieth century.  The Voyage That Never Ends is a collection of his unfinished novels.  Most of these are told from the perspective of his fictionalized doppelganger, Sigbjourn Wilderness.  Sigbjourn travels with his wife, Primrose (the double of Lowry’s real wife, Margerie Bonner), across the Americas; and everywhere they go, they see the scrawled graffiti, “Kilroy was here.” 

It was enough to make me want to start my own American road-trip novel.  I asked Greg if he had any ideas about characters, and he proposed someone called “Oswald the Ostrich Optometrist.”

In The Voyage That Never Ends, though, this mysterious Kilroy, who has reached every point on the map before the characters and changed it, becomes a sign of imperialism and destruction.  Malcolm Lowry wasn’t casually aware of nature, the environment, or the changes his generation was incurring: I don’t think he was casually aware of anything.  He split hairs.  He once had Sigbjourn Wilderness wonder, on an airplane, “if he had the courage to take off his shoes.”

Malcolm Lowry did have courage: perhaps not the courage to take off his shoes (who does, in the deeper sense?), but the much more profound courage to write utterly unique books.  I think he was afraid that modern society was tending toward using language at its most convenient, and least subtle.  There’s a section of The Voyage That Never Ends where the Wildernesses are riding a bus through the U.S., and gradually the description becomes nothing but the words of the advertisements they pass along the way.

            I’ve said this before (though never in my blog): it’s dangerous to homogenize language.  Human language, human communication, is like an ecosystem: it can’t be healthy without diverse and startling interactions.  That’s why I tell stories.  Stories, in their utter specificity, teach us how to be thoughtful, autonomous, and empathetic; to survive hardships; to fight stereotypes and dogmatism; and to find reasons to laugh.  (Odd reasons, perhaps.  I’m imagining a gaggle of protestors marching with signs that say, “Take off your shoes!”)

None of this should be taken for granted.

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Leaving Shelter Cove, we twisted upwards, then downwards, then upwards again.  When we finally reached Garberville, we pointed.  “There it is!”

“Yup.  That’s just one log.”

On the drive home, we stopped at a gift-shop.  One of the items for sale was a carved placard saying, “Greatness is nothing without passion.”  At lunch, we ate sandwiches and drove off with Greg’s suitcase still on top of the car.

The City of Brotherly Love

            I made Carmen watch 1776 before we went to Philadelphia. 

            This, in case you don’t know, is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Not the Revolutionary War: no, just the excruciating process of signing the Declaration of Independence.

Carmen was easily bored with the dialogue (Why does no one ever love that movie as much as me?  Its wit?  Its drama?  Its completely accurate portrayal of the founding fathers?), so we skipped to all the songs.

            “I hear the chirp, chirp, chirp, of an eaglet being born…”

            John Adams, the hero of that notable film, informs us in song that Philadelphia is “foul,” “fetid,” and “filthy.”  I’d been to Philly once before, in high school.  On this my unbedazzled visit, I found it to be a town of unhealthy food, strange smells wafting from underground, cheap prices, angry people, abysmal heat, and carefully preserved history.

Before we went, Greg’s dad tried to dissuade us by explaining that a Philly pretzel vender once tried to fight him over whether or not Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves.

This, of course, only hardened our resolve.

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            “Do you know where I left my car?”

            “No, sorry, man,” Greg said.

            Our interlocutor swayed forward plaintively.  “Can I touch your hair?”  Without waiting for assent, the young man gave Greg’s hair a good tousle.  Carmen and I giggled behind our hands: this was the same guy we’d seen wrestling a friend in the street, while a taxi cab drove past flipping them off.  He wobbled backwards, gave Greg’s hair another pat, then repeated, “Do you know where I left my car?”

Perhaps some explication is in order.  There were three of us, on this summer adventure: myself, Greg, and Carmen.  Carmen, like Greg and I, was born in California and went to UCSB—but after graduating, she moved to New York, lived in Harlem, and worked for Starbucks until she landed an internship with a branch of PBS.  She’s the bravest person I know, and one of the most cheerful—but even she admitted, after a few hours in the cheesesteak city, that we’d washed up in a strange place.

            We started from Manhattan, and crossed an entire state (New Jersey) in less than two hours.  We’d booked beds in a hostel next to Independence Hall.  As it turned out, this hostel was also next to a graveyard, Ben Franklin’s privy, a bookstore that regulated everything not written by Nabokov to a slim shelf labeled “Pulp”, the house of the inventor of the soda, and a bar called the National Mechanics.  We got to Philly on a Friday, little knowing what was in store:

The Bar Crawl.

            It was a hostel-sponsored event.  The friendly staff provided booze before we set out (cheap gin, cheaper ginger ale), then led us on a whirlwind of bacchanalian delights.  There must have been twenty drinking establishments in the area, and most of them sold $2 cocktails.  One even offered a $1 taco, which Greg ordered and inhaled while Carmen and I were talking about relationships.

            “Mmm,” he interjected.  “That was a tasty taco.”

“I did not see you eat a taco!” Carmen kept exclaiming for the rest of the night.

            There was a map in the kitchen of our hostel.  Tacked to it were pins from the cities of everyone’s origin, and one held up the note, “I got drunk here.  It was clean and no one spoke.”

            This statement was quite true: our hostel was very clean, and all its occupants were very content with silence.  The only people we made friends with were two British girls (Rach and Harry) who taught us a card game and told a delightful story of renting a yellow VW Beetle.

We lost Rach and Harry, however, sometime around the third bar.  That was when Greg, Carmen and I decided to stumble back to our hostel.  We got sidetracked on the way by the National Mechanics.  This establishment was once a church (the booth benches were pews), once a bank, and once a private club for steampunk tinkerers, whose gewgaws still littered the walls.  They sold us delicious hard apple cider.

            On the walk back, there was a trail of human feces rubbed five feet along the cobblestones.

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            “Now, don’t stick your knees into the gaps between the railings.  I know that those gaps are the shape of knees, and it might be very tempting to rest your knees there; but sometimes you’ll find that, once you put your knees there, you cannot get your knees out again.  In that case, I would have to call the fire department.  This has happened many times, so, I repeat, please do not stick your knees into those gaps between the railings.  I do not want to call the fire department…”

            Our tour guide through Independence Hall was charmingly fixated on details.  The above speech was given in the meeting hall of the 2^nd Continental Congress.  In the original Senate building, he spent half the time telling about how, when John Adams was elected President, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson got into a polite battle over who would exit first.

            We didn’t go see the Liberty Bell, but we did step into a white, peeling building that was once a branch of the National Bank.  It was being used as a portrait gallery of revolutionary war notables.  We saw the faces of Martha Washington, Thomas Paine, and many others, including, of course, Ben Franklin.  Philadelphia is proud of its original Renaissance man.  Thinking himself clever, Greg had taken to calling the fellow “B. Frank” whenever we saw another statue.  To my high jubilation, a teenage boy behind me in the portrait gallery told his friends, “Hey look, guys!  It’s B. Frank,” thus proving that Greg’s little joke was not quite as original as he’d thought.

            Two and a half days is a long time, in Philadelphia: at about the halfway point, we began devoting most of our conversation to how excited we were about leaving Philadelphia.  Finally, the long-awaited moment came.  As we were sitting on the bus, ready to head back to New York, I noticed a woman outside the window with bow-ties tattooed on the backs of her knees.

            This was the image of that great, patriotic, revolutionary city that I took home with me.  I offer no deep analysis: only, as we pulled away, my head began to ring with the words of 1776’s opening number.

“Vote for independency!”