When the DC Metro works, it’s a marvel. You can cut through backed up traffic, relax, read, people watch, listen to music and pay less for parking at the Metro station than you would downtown. It’s not the cleanest venue and the parking garage stairwells always smell like urine, but it’s cleaner than New York’s subway and at least the trains don’t smell like urine – sometimes there’s a faint smell of vomit, but I don’t think that I’ve ever smelled urine on the trains, which is pretty amazing considering that bathrooms in a Metro station are rare and often locked. At least people wait until they make it to the parking garage.
But almost a quarter of the times that I ride the trains, there is some kind of snafu and several times those snafus have escalated into major events, like the time that the “derecho” storm went though and left my husband and I stranded at the Twinbrook station unable to get home for the night. We ended up spending the night at a hotel that had no power, guided only by the light of our slowly fading cell phones. The Hyatt Hotel charged us $100 to stay there, even though they had no power, but they had to write down our credit card number old-school style on a piece of paper.
Another time, I was cooped up in a Metro train with broken air conditioning in about 100 degree heat, sweat pouring down my back, seriously afraid that I would pass out and they’d have to peel me off the train floor like stepped-on, flattened out gum residue.
Most recently, my husband Vince and I decided to try taking the Metro and then hooking up with a shuttle to travel to Wolf Trap to see the Johns Butler Trio perform. The Metro ride went fine. When we got on the shuttle, a man stood in front of the bus and gave a little speech. “We will leave exactly 20 minutes after the show ends,” he said, repeating that line about three times. -- OK, I’ve got it -- Then, almost as an aside and in an accented voice, he said something about 11 o’clock or 11:30. I didn’t quite make out what he said but I figured that it was irrelevant since the show started at 7 and we’d be out of there before 11 or 11:30.
The John Butler Trio was great, even though I felt conspicuously old compared to the rest of the audience. But I was surprised that the performers seemed blasé about an encore, and as we packed up and headed for the bus, something didn’t feel right. We saw a long line for the bathroom and congratulated ourselves on our foresight in preparing to leave promptly without having to wait in line. “We know how to do it,” we assured each other, nodding sagely. “Yeah, that’s right. We’ve done this enough that we’re pros, as opposed to these young whippersnapper concert-goers, who are just novices.”
We were first in line for the bus but the drivers, who were socializing and eating Indian food out of Styrofoam containers, looked at us strangely. “It can’t be over yet,” they said. “They told us it wouldn’t be over until 10:55. It must be intermission.” But hadn’t we seen the John Butler road crew dismantling the stage? Could it be that they were just the warm up act?
So we headed back to the entryway and, sure enough, part two featured a group we had never heard of called Soja, a white reggae band from Virginia, who had drawn a sold out crowd that included friends and family from nearby VA.
So it turns out that we weren’t so sage and experienced after all. In fact, we were dunces, who weren’t even familiar with the headlining group we were about to see.
At the end of the energetic, peace-and-love-and-ganja and yeah-it’s-the-young-people-who-are-gonna’-change-the-world concert (as if no other generation had ever thought that way) we wrapped up promptly, with the warning that the bus would leave in 20 minutes ringing in our ears. We made it out to the bus location about seven minutes after the show ended, and at exactly 11:01 p.m., we saw the shuttles taking off.
“NOOOO!” I cried, my hand reaching out in disbelief as I breathed bus fumes. How could they be leaving so soon? Surely, there must be another shuttle coming! But there were no other shuttles.
To make matters worse, a wasted guy who saw us out of the corner of his eye decided to loudly focus his attention on us in an embarrassing way that emphasized the disparity in our ages. “Oh MAN,” he hollered sloppily. “I TRIED to get my PARENTS to come but they said they couldn’t make it through such a looong concert. But here you are – people your age can DO it – the PROOF is in the PUDDING!” He continued, “You know, what does that mean, the proof is in the pudding? I’ve always heard that expression but what does it REALLY mean- that the proof is in the pudding?”
I could feel people looking at us and I felt peeved enough that had pudding been available, I might have shoved the proof right in his face. Or, if I had been calm enough to think about it, I might have responded in a way that would befuddle his alcohol and ganja-addled mind with an attempt at a clever retort, such as:
“It’s an expression that recognizes the inherent ability of substances to change their chemical composition and consistency when acted upon by an outside source at sufficiently high temperatures over a measured period of time. It’s an expression that recognizes the human propensity to doubt that physical properties can change dramatically, but the gradual thickening of the pudding provides evidence that such changes can, indeed, occur, thereby also casting doubt upon other human doubts. And once you start doubting doubt, you’re in radical danger of actually becoming a believer, so watch out!”
Yeah, I think I could have blown his mind.
As it was, I just fumed and we trudged along to the Ranger’s Station to ask what to do and the ranger offhandedly recommended that we call a cab as he turned his attention to summoning assistance to break up a fight that had erupted among the crowd that was as ganja and alcohol-soaked as you might expect at a reggae concert. Under such circumstances, “Peace, bro’” can easily morph into “I’m gonna’ #@$%!, you %!@#$!”
Vince called a cab company but they told us that it could take 40 minutes for them to show up and it was already 11:15 p.m. I knew that, on week nights, the last scheduled Metro train traveled around midnight and we needed to make a connection. There seemed to be little way that we could make it in time and the ranger station had started filling up with others who were in the same predicament.
“Didn’t they say they left 20 minutes after the show ended?” someone asked, mystified. “Yes, but I think that they also said 20 minutes after the show ended OR 11 p.m., whichever came first,” I replied. “At least that’s sure how it appears.”
I tried calling Yellow Cab and they estimated 15-20 minutes, which was more reasonable than the other company but still dicey. Two other guys asked to share our cab and we agreed.
We made our way to the front by the road, near the Wolf Trap marquee. Clusters of other abandoned people were also waiting for a cab and one was on her phone, loudly complaining about having waited for an hour, which was clearly a lie since the concert hadn’t even been over that long. Sure, during the concert it was all peace and love and ganja, but once the cab grab competition commenced, the claws came out it became a battle for survival, deviousness and all.
Yellow cabs started showing up and people swarmed to them, with the fastest and most aggressive winning out. A cab came that could have been the one I called but I heard a would-be rider plead with a driver, “Please, I’ll pay you 40 dollars,” and I lost out.
My husband and I decided to split up with me taking the front guard, going as far forward as possible, and him taking up the rear guard near the marquee, where we had told the cab we would be. By now I knew that someone must have grabbed the cab that had been summoned for me and I wanted to get to the front of the waiting area. Avoiding eye contact, I moseyed to the front until I approached a fortified cluster of about six people who I knew were younger and more aggressive than me. I didn’t want another fight to break out so acquiesced and I let them take the next cab.
Another cab came and I nearly jumped in front of it until he stopped. I climbed in, feeling like a celebrity in a limo, gliding past the paparazzi, as I directed the driver past the other waiting clusters and picked up my crew – Vince and the two other guys with whom we had agreed to share a ride.
Still, we were in quite a pickle. Even if the cab could get us to the green line before the bewitching hour, we still were likely to miss our connection to the red line. We drove downtown with our co-riders with the aim of catching the last red line train. As it turns out, we missed the midnight train but managed to catch the unadvertised post-midnight train that picks up stragglers, now off-duty Metro workers, and other assorted denizens of the night who probably don’t have to get up to go to work the next morning.
During one other Metro debacle, with swarms of people pressing in on me and no trains in sight, I had an overwhelming urge to escape but the only escape route was a down escalator and I need to go up. So up the down escalator I went in high heels. It’s not something that I recommend, and I almost tripped and fell, but I did prove that someone my age can do it. Someone with a compulsion to escape the teeming hordes can reverse course, outpace a machine, and make her way to freedom. In fact, you might say that the proof is in the pudding.
