“Do not go to the bathroom on the property. Otherwise, we’ll lock you up,” warned the security official, striding stiffly past us. As we huddled together on the icy granite sidewalk, one thing was clear: no one would be defecating in the bushes tonight. One public piddle or surreptitious squat wasn’t worth being shipped to Guantanamo.
Sure, the scene was familiar enough: nerdy white boys in fraying women’s jeans skulked around, talking music and secretly tallying the hipster points they earned each time they said “crescendo” (I think I’ll use that word on my Live Journal!). This wasn’t going to be my normal weekend –instead of being cramped inside the cloudy confines of the Black Cat, I found myself camped outside the Kennedy Center at 10p.m., waiting to receive free tickets to Sufjan Stevens’ Feb. 5 performance with the Center’s Opera House orchestra. It would be another 11 hours before I would receive those tickets.
Looking around, I saw dozens of tents and sleeping bags, and nearly as many open alcohol containers, not to mention a completely empty NyQuil bottle that a scruffy chap had downed. Nothing conquers the cold like alcohol and cold medicine. Not even making whoopee.
Once established, our camp resembled a sort of high-tech hobo village, complete with a boiling pot and Chex Mix. Our inviting setup attracted two GW students—John and Finn—who introduced themselves as number one and number two in line, respectively. How early did they arrive to earn such a coveted placing? Seven fifty-seven a.m.
Finn was quite the character, sporting an Ushanka (Russian fur hat) and rambling on about the K-Y warming jelly he just purchased and the S’mores he had roasted over a Sterno can. It was Finn’s girlfriend Annie, however, who piqued our interest. She recounted a gripping tale of how a raving homeless man had once chased her through downtown D.C. for six blocks until three burly men wielding crowbars (for assumedly felonious purposes) saved her by beating the transient to a pulp and tossing him down an escalator. The homeless man, according to Annie, has never been seen since. May he rest in peace.
My mental capacities left me slowly but surely over the course of the night, and I began fantasizing that the vaguely cylindrical, lumpy bodies wrapped in sleeping bags were Baby Ruth candy bars. It seemed that in my musically-motivated quest I had gone the Pixies route, begging the question, “Where is my mind?” Was one folk artist really worth risking hypothermia?
Luckily, none of the campers suffered such a fate, much to the dismay of the circling seagulls bent on snagging a little man flesh for breakfast.
Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center camp-out demonstrated the time-tested fact that people can usually get away with cutting corners in life. This was true for the line-cutters, especially the woman who sat down in the front of the line at 2:00 a.m. (“I don’t see a real line here,” she claimed). If they want to cut, that’s their deal. As for me, I prefer to play fair, living by the childhood aphorism “no cuts, no butts, no coconuts.”
Friday night’s campout was, for many, an entrepreneurial venture, as tickets for the show are now selling for upwards of $100 each on eBay. As tempting as it is to cash in the chips, I can’t do it. I didn’t survive frigid winds, anthropophagus seagulls and a suffocating cloud of pretension to just sell out. I Say Yes! To Sufjan!
