Paul Revere and Waterproof Mascara: A Favorite Travel Memory

Note: this is a bit longer than most of my entries; it's something I wrote for an essay compilation a few years back. I hope it makes you laugh a bit. Hope you all have had a great weekend! 

A couple of years ago I was in Washington, D.C. visiting my cousin at Georgetown University and staying in the fabulous old-school townhouse he shared with five other guys.  I had a friend with me and it was her first time in D.C., so on a Saturday the lot of us loaded up and went to Mt.Vernon, George Washington’s home, now a museum with various living displays of How Things Used To Be.  Along for the ride were three of their female friends, Tiwi, Kiwi and Regan. (I can't remember Tiwi and Kiwi's real names, but my cousin called them Tiwi and Kiwi, so I do, too.) 

We had been at Mt. Vernon only a short while when a big storm blew in off the Atlantic, complete with tornado/severe thunderstorm/hail warnings etc. We were informed by bullhorn they were shutting down Mt. Vernon and we were to leave ASAP.  (As an aside, I’m terrified of tornadoes; I was in one while living in Memphis, it went right over the top of my car on an expressway, with tree limbs hitting the shaking car, lightening bugs coming out midday it was so dark, that sort of thing.  Terrifying. So I hear the word "tornado," I’m outta there, no questions asked.) All the tourists are running for their cars as the sheeting rain starts pouring down on us and at that moment we remember: Kiwi has locked the keys in her car, an old, decrepit Honda Civic hatchback.  We knew just after we arrived that she had done this, but we had a cell phone and a Triple A membership, so we thought it was no big deal and we'd take care of it when we were leaving. This was before the Doom of God started rolling in.

We’ve arrived in several cars so there's no reason we can’t just leave it/them behind, but I guess we were in a patriotic ‘all for one, one for all’ spirit.  Most of the guys, along with Kiwi and Tiwi, went back to the car to try to break in, so there are three of us huddled under an overhang at the main building, the wind blowing rain into our faces, trying to convince Triple A to rescue us. But they need an address to dispatch someone.  Wha’??  An address? It’s Mt. Vernon!  I try telling the phone girl I don’t have an address, it’s Mt. Vernon for heaven’s sake, everyone just knows where it is, we’re in that huge circular driveway out front, please come help us.  (I was saying it in a nice way, of course.) But no dice: no street address, no dispatch. And a worker is shooing us out of the overhang to boot. 

I head to the gift shop, getting drenched and blown to bits, trying to find anything that might have their street address on it, while the Triple A girl is trying to hang up on me.  Nope, nothing but PO boxes. And the sales girl is trying to lock up, she couldn’t care less about the address. “It’s just Mt. Vernon,” she tells me. I know! Evidently everyone but Triple A knows this! I finally concede to phone girl, we have no address, and hang up.  I’m pretty sure the phone is going to croak by now anyway, due to the rain-soaking it has received.  

We head back to the car, hail dripping out of my hair, watching my cousin’s roommate trying in vain to pop the door locks.  I explain that Triple A won’t come because we don’t have an address.  One of the roommates is from Brooklyn, born and raised. He’s hilarious, he’s been cracking us up this whole trip, and he yells out in frustration in his heavy Brooklyn accent, “What’s the deal with the A A A?”  But instead of calling it Triple A like every other person I’ve ever met, he calls out all the letters, “Ay Ay Ay.”  I think it’s the accent that gets me, or perhaps I am delirious from the wet, and I can’t help, I crack up and can’t stop.  This lightens the mood and we finally concede we’re screwed as far as Triple A is concerned, we’re gonna have to leave it behind and squish into the other cars.  (Steve’s line would become our second-favorite quotation of the day.) 

Just as we are splitting up into the other cars, a guy walks up.  “You need some help??”  I turn around, and he’s obviously an employee on his way home because he’s dressed in full Colonial Era regalia, right down to the breeches and colonial hat.  Hot damn, Paul Revere is going to save us!  Could this outing get any more absurd? He has a hanger in his car (of course he does, to hang up the uniform) and goes to work. But, still no luck.  By this point we are soaked to the skin, my hair is heavy with little bits of hail, and thanks anyway Paul Revere, I just wanna go home. Suddenly I hear a slew of profanity such as I don’t think anyone from the Colonial Era ever imagined. I turn to get a closer look at what he’s staring at through the car window: a latch on the floor that pops the hatchback.  He slides the hanger in through the window, pops the floor latch, and we’re in!  Paul Revere saves the day!  Again!  

A couple of hours later we are safely ensconced at the townhouse, showered, sipping hot chocolate, hair finally drying, Kiwi and Tiwi and Regan long gone. Shooter (another roommate, real name forgotten) finally gets a chance to tell us that when he and Regan heard the bullhorn announcement, she immediately stopped in her tracks. “Dammit!”  Shooter thinks she’s now realizing, like the rest of us did, that we have a torrential storm approaching and a car with no keys.  But no. “ Dammit! I should have worn waterproof mascara!”  (Hence Steve’s quotation being only the second-favorite of the day.)

It became a big inside joke; when something starts going really wrong, you say “I should have worn waterproof mascara!”  I love this travel memory because even when everything IS going wrong, there is always a reason to laugh. It just helps if you have Paul Revere and a guy from Brooklyn along for the ride.  And waterproof mascara.