I've been here over a month and have given up keeping track of how many days I've been here, so I will just write about isolated inspired incidents.
Yesterday.. it was Friday night. And, naturally, I was hanging out with a guy. That's what hot journalists do when they're not busy saving the world. They hang out with their creepy, 29-year-old male friends! Unless certain younger guys in their singles ward balls up and ask them out... Anyways.
Well, I was asked out, kind of, by a congressional intern I met at a press event the other day. He had asked me for my number, suggesting we "go out for coffee sometime." Apparently my halo wasn't bright enough for him to recognize that I'm Mormon. :P Yesterday, he texted me and invited me to go with him and some friends to happy hour. I said, "I don't drink." I could just tell him I'm Mormon, but I like it when people figure things out on their own. So I decided to go with my Mormon male-friend who has come to play the simultaneous roles of gay friend trying to set me up with other guys, mentor trying to give me ridiculous advice about life, and flirty guy friend who likes to argue with me about stuff, like Obama. It's always nice to have a friend who balances between being fun to hang out with and sporadically ticking you off.
So, there we were in Chinatown. I was in a particularly happy mood, probably because it was the weekend and I had just finished a casual Friday. So I walked along in my Yogscast sweatshirt, attracting extra stares from passerbyers who probably wondered what the heck a "diggy hole" is, and of course attracting the usual stares from people who can't seem to comprehend a woman being 6 feet tall. We went to dinner at a Tai place where I had the most delectable chicken and spicy fried rice. It was mostly delicious because my body had not quite recovered from my kickboxing class the day before and I had been ravenous all day. By the time I got to the restaurant, I had become giddy and moody because my blood sugar was so low. I'm sure I was obnoxious.
So, he happened to have two movie passes, and I convinced him to take me to "Vow," a sappy chick flick that had opened that day (which was yesterday by the way). But 7:30 was sold out, so we decided to wander aimlessly and argue about stuff until the 9 pm showing. I doubted whether the streets of chinatown could be entertaining for that long. But one medium McDonald's milkshake later, I was on a sugar-high mood swing, and we came upon a spectacular street performer.
The scrawny young white man stood under a lamp post, right in front of the Chinatown movie theater, playing an electric guitar and belting out songs by Journey and Bob Marley, occasionally changing words in the songs to match our settings. ("In the government yard in Trenchtown" was changed to "by a movie theater in Chinatown") The man was quite talented and sounded just like Journey when he sand "Small Town Girl." He had a stand up mic and his electric guitar hooked up to a small speaker, and he had a bike leaned up against the lamp post. What a beautiful thought, this man travelling around DC on his bike, with his equipment on his back.
After a couple minutes of the music drifting out of that speaker, five people had stopped to listen. We had stopped too but were a little ways off observing. One man, African American and about 50, stopped and started dancing on the side walk. A woman walking by with some friends started dancing too. Soon about 20 people were gathered around listening, singing along or dancing.
"This is why I love being a journalist," I uttered. I love observing the little joys in life. As much darkness as there is in this world, complete strangers can still be united on a Friday night in downtown DC by a lone street performer. How grand is the human state. As much darkness there is in human nature, there is also so much joy, fight and potential. So much beauty.
As the performer ran out of songs, we stood there still, observing the people wander back to their normalness after that moment of shared joy. I was just going to check my phone to see the time when a short black man with a fat mustache approached us.
"Brotheh!" he exclaimed to my companion, "you gotta winnah here! And if you find a winner, you gotta keep 'er!" He gestured to me, and I laughed at the awkwardness of the situation.
"You know what?! You gotta love her.." Then he proceeded into some sort of rhyme that involved numbers and references to love. His accent was too thick for me to understand him, but I got the general idea, and I soon realized he was a beggar trying to get money. After that he subjected us to a sermon about the fact that he had not asked us for anything but had instead given us something (his rhyme). He then proceeded to preach about how God had saved him and would save those who were kind.
"If someone gave me $100, it wouldn't mean as much as if you gave me $1, if his heart wasn't in it," the man rambled. Then he again lectured my friend about holding onto me, loving me and fixing me a bubble bath after a long day. I couldn't help but crack up. We were both laughing, but he rambled on, interjecting "Oh baby!" and "Ow!" every few sentences. After about fifteen minutes of this entertainment, my friend said, "I don't have any cash, but I can give you my extra metro card." I could tell he desperately wanted this man to go away. But to my continued laughter, the man continued, now preeching about my friend's kindness. My friend kept trying to interject, but the man never even took a breath. A pause finally came, and my friend shook his hand and backed away. As we escaped, I couldn't help but laugh.
"This would not happen anywhere else," I said between laughs. Don't get me wrong, I was definitely not laughing at that poor man. I found his bold cheerfulness to be entertaining and uplifting. But the man had been so forward, and the situation was so ridiculous, I couldn't help it.
We had been listening to this man for about a half hour, and it was finally time for the movie. We went in and stood in line among giggling girls and their reluctant boyfriends. When we got into the theater, I was reminded of relief society at church. About 80% of the people in the crowded theater were females, and they were all talking and giggling. Of course, the theater showed a commercial about an orphan chimpanzee which induced many "aww"s from the crowd. But not as much "aww"s as half-way through the movie when Channing Tatum, in all his muscley glory, started crying because his wife had forgotten him. This brought on the biggest, loudest, unisoned "AWW" I had ever heard. Of course, I joined in. I couldn't help it. After the movie, I was so tired that the 15 minute wait for the train in the metro was a sleepy haze. But I thoroughly enjoyed my Chinatown experience. It's nice to be girly sometimes and go see a chick flick, watch street performers and get complimented by a homeless man.
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