Going Rogue in Washington, D.C.

I asked my neighbor, Marcel Proost, who lives on Buckshot Creek Road up on the north coast, if he wanted to come to Washington, D.C. with me. If you are a reader of Hell Mouth you will know that Marcel was briefly busted for pot growing a few weeks ago, but the judge let him off. I happened to know that Marcel had over 100,000 frequent flyer miles, even though he’d never been on a plane flight. So I figured he could use them to come to Washington with me, his artsy-fartsy neighbor.

The only conditions I made were that he agree not to bring any product with him and to wear a tux to the awards ceremony. I’d get him a room in the same hotel I was staying in. He’d not been east of Healdsburg since 1984, so I figured this would be an entertaining event.

Marcel liked his room at the Park Hyatt in Foggy Bottom, including the flat screen TV and walk-in shower. He was especially amused by the minibar that threatened to repossess your home and have your savings impounded if you so much as breathed on it.

Marcel went to the Capitol building Friday and listened to a congressman from South Carolina praise the drug companies and rail against socialism and Obamacare. Then he saw another congressman get up and praise American ingenuity and say that if the Democrats pass their health care bill, his grandmother would have her hearing aid and dentures repossessed by the federal government. And another congressman, this one a Democrat, praised the drug companies, saying that people had a right to choose which insurance company was going to screw them. “Don’t let them take away our freedom to choose!” the congressman had yelled. Marcel noted that all three congressmen he listened to used the exact same argument and the exact same language.

“It’s as if someone paid them to say that.”

“Marcel, haven’t you ever heard of a lobbyist?” I ask him. “Of course the congressmen are paid to say that.”

“I hear more praise for good drugs here in Washington than I did at the bikers’ convention in Eureka last summer,” says Marcel.

So Saturday night we get dressed up and go to the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Awards ceremony. A black limo picks us up and delivers us to the theater. Marcel still thinks he’s going to catch sight of one of those hot conservative Republican babes like Michelle Bachmann or maybe even Sarah Palin. But instead, it’s mostly liberals in the hall tonight, a major disappointment for a libertarian like Marcel.

He does however like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who calls the awards ceremony to order and bangs a borrowed wooden gavel on the lectern. Turns out she is an opera fan, and she gives very funny opening remarks that consist of a list of all the scenes in opera that take place either in a courtroom or a prison.

Justice Ginsberg is tiny, has her hair pulled back in a severe bun, and when you say hello she kind of crooks her neck like a bird and looks up at you with a wry, questioning look as if sizing you up. I immediately feel a twinge of anxiety, wondering if I’ve paid all my parking fines. I don’t think anything escapes her. She probably developed that crook in her neck from twenty some years of listening to Justice Scalia.

Justice Ginsberg fixes an eye on Marcel, and I begin to sweat bullets. I’m thinking maybe she has special powers of detection. Maybe she has X-ray vision and can see right through the rented tux to the Thai stick I am convinced he’s got hidden in his vest pocket.

But the judge is cool. The ceremony goes on. Denyce Graves is the emcee, making the presentations sort of like they do at the Oscars, standing in front of a transparent plexiglass lectern and reading from a teleprompter. She’s looking fine, and I see she’s got Marcel’s attention.

After the ceremony there’s a dinner hosted by the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose name is Rocco. He wears handcrafted alligator cowboy boots with his black tuxedo. Marcel asks him about the boots, which are, of course, a major conversation piece.

“You wrassle that ‘gator yourself?”

No, says the Chairman. He bought them in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had not known that they had alligators in Jackson Hole, but it could be they’ve migrated there to work in the hotel or food service business.

The Chairman is reputed to be a very wealthy man and a fan of theater, baseball, horse racing and country music, in other words our indigenous American beaux arts, our native Kunstwerke. Someone there tells me he contemplated buying the Cincinnati Reds but thought the asking price of one billion too high. Perhaps he could just buy the NEA for half that amount and not have to deal with the flamers in Congress. That would be an exemplary form of the great American tradition of privatizing.

Chairman Rocco looks like a guy that could bang a Congressman’s head, and given that one can’t get much of anything in Washington accomplished without banging heads, either figuratively or literally, he may be the right choice to go mano a mano with some senator who thinks culture starts and ends with pro wrestling and wet tee-shirt contests (not to denigrate either of those exceptional disciplines).

I see Marcel moving over and chatting up Denyce Graves. She’s very demure and not the least put upon. I can see his gestures, and I know he’s talking about his new backhoe.

I talk to André Previn, who is a very nice guy. He tells a story about how he first heard opera when he was a nine year-old living in Berlin before the war. His father, a lawyer and a very methodical man, had decided that it was time for little André to hear an opera. But he thought his son too young to sit through a very long opera. So he asked around to find out what were the shorter operas and ended up buying him a ticket for Salome, because Salome is only ninety minutes long. That got André interested in opera.

André Previn was not too long ago married to Anne-Sophie Mutter. They were what you call a December-May couple, being that she was 34 years younger. He tells me he recently conducted Messiaen’s “Des Canyons aux Etoiles” for the first time at the age of almost eighty. The man has my respect in more ways than one.

So after a room service breakfast we’re off to the airport, passing by way of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s been a fun, patriotically inspiring trip.