The Sporadic Diary

April 23, 2011

At times to say someone is a tourist is to hang an epithet on them.  A motorist with out of state license plates driving very slowing in front of me will garner the tourist label.  So will anyone who asks too many questions at the cash register.  It doesn’t make sense, it’s just a thing I have, probably inherited from my father, who once complained during a trip he took to Vancouver that he didn’t care for the place because it had too many foreigners. 

It isn’t hard to spot tourists: they usually look out of place, travel in packs, and wear garish clothing.  I know that’s the stereotypical description, but there is a germ of truth (and sometimes more) in every stereotype.  I bring up this subject because my wife, Mary, and I just got back from a mini-vacation to Washington D.C.  Our trip was during school vacation week in the northeast, so the place was crawling with tourists, and when I say crawling I mean crawling.  Of course, we were tourists too, although we defied the stereotype.  We had an advantage over the real tourists because we had lived in the area for three years in the early 1980s and so we knew our way around and had seen most of the sights before.  Furthermore, we walked everywhere, and at a brisk pace.  In other words, we weren’t crawlers and we weren’t gawkers.

The District draws a lot of tourists for obvious reasons.  Tourism must be one of its largest industries, along with lobbying and protest rallies, which, when you think about it, fall in the same category of influence peddling.

Although I had been exposed to it before, I was amazed by the number of white, delivery-style trucks that lined the main thoroughfares of the city hawking souvenirs of every conception, enough t-shirts to cloth a small country, and a seemingly endless supply of incredibly bad food.  And in every direction you looked there were armies of middle and high school students, often in matching slickers, tromping off toward their next destination.  I thought of McClellan endlessly prepping the Union troops for battles he would ultimately not fight. 

For the most part, we avoided the tourist magnets, the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and so on, preferring instead to try our luck at places we hadn’t visited before.  Like the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court generally is not high on most people’s sightseeing list.  After all, while most Americans can name all five of the main Simpsons cartoon characters, relatively few can name our five basic legal rights.  So, one day we zipped over to the Supreme Court building and took a short tour, which is where we learned about the comparative popularity of the Simpsons.  We were so impressed we decided to come back the next day to hear oral arguments.  Hey, we thought, if few people are interested in a brief tour of the Supreme Court building, who will care about oral arguments?  Especially since the scheduled session was going to be about an environmental case, not pornography, abortion, or who should be President.

Well, were we fooled.  Even though we got to the Supreme Court building at 7:45am for a hearing at 10am, there was a long line of people already snaking its way down the steps and up the block.  They didn’t look like tourists though, as many wore dark suits, were carrying briefcases, and were reading newspapers.  Tourists don’t do that.  And there was only one, lonely delivery truck within sight.  We couldn’t see what it was selling, but I imagined t-shirts with the nine Justices on them dressed as the Simpsons.

City Guy In The 'Burbs

Episode Ten

A surefire way to determine if you are in a city or a suburb is to take notice of what people are wearing, particularly during weekdays.  In the city you see lots of suits and workplace emsembles (my description of what many working women – oh, excuse me, women working outside the home – wear to the office).  Overcoats and trench coats are popular, although not as popular as they used to be a couple of decades ago.  In fact, trench coats are now associated more with flashers and disgruntled high school students who might be thinking of shooting up their school. 

In certain cities, like New York and Chicago, you are apt to see true fashion, you know, the trendy apparel that is depicted in glossy magazine ads and billboards.  If you want to learn what the really in people are wearing this year, go to the city.  I don’t mean haute couture, although you’ll occasionally see that too.  Where else would you expect to see a woman strutting down the street in an outfit that looks like a getup from a science fiction movie?  I’m referring to just regular ol’ couture.  The city is the home of Armani, Blass, Versace, Dior, and Prada.  On the street you’ll see eye-popping shirts, fabulous neckties, and a wide assortment of hats, including fedoras, Homburgs, Stetons, tams, and fuzzy Russian cossacks.  Not to mention shoes that would make Imelda Marcos weep, and probably did when she was alive and building palaces to contain her collection.  City women, incidentally, are miles ahead of city men in the shoe department, although I personally wouldn’t want to teeter on four inch heels all day.

Clothing is much more subdued in the suburbs.  And it is only a slight exaggeration to say that everyone looks the same there.  In the ‘burbs the height of fashion is J.Crew, Eddie Bauer, and LL Bean.  Oh, you can throw Timberland in there too.  Baseball-style caps are really big and spandex passes for rich fabric.  In those suburban communities that still bear some of their rural roots, you’ll even see overalls periodically.  When I do I wonder if they are shooting a remake of Green Acres.  In the ‘burbs you never hear the word dapper uttered.

Business casual, a euphemism for plain dress, has taken a lot of the pizzazz out of work fashion.  But the gap between what people wear in the city versus the ‘burbs has remained constant.  While city workers have retreated to button-down shirts and sweaters, slacks, and “sensible” shoes, suburban workers have moved to golf shirts, fleece, and sportswear, including items with pro team logos.  From time to time I’ve even seen office workers in t-shirts with picture graphics on them.  That’s right, office workers.  If I see too many employees wearing Patriots and Red Sox jackets I think the movers have arrived.

I don’t know where this is all headed, but schools have learned that students are more disciplined and perform better when they wear uniforms to school.  Maybe if the workplace reinstated a dress code, we’d see a rise in productivity.  Just a thought.