Then catch this impatience on my part: "Shall I put it in your pocket?" I anticipated the slight brush of his hip that gesture would accomplish, stirring his manhood with chutzpah.
He took the card, poor Lou mashed among us unable to completely disappear.
*****
I followed her path through the herd of unknowns, with my Canon Powershot working not so hot and my own skills photographing in lighted rooms at night in need of more of that 400 ASA acceleration that arrested movement.
I caught her profile once and cut into the air with my sigh of relief.
I persisted in photographing blurs, at one point capturing her forehead, at another the back of her head.
She and Lou headed toward the back door, a few of us having trotted that far. I held the door and called out: "You were great! . . . Did your dreams come true?" (an allusion to the one encore she had sung and gotten away with, "Somewhere over the Rainbow," certainly in better shape than Judy Garland in her last days).
She showed me her right profile. "Yes," she muttered unconvincingly.
"Keep the late sixties alive!" I implored their receding backs.
She turned back to me briefly and sadly.
I let them fade into the darkness and turned to the man beside me.
"We just shared a very important moment," I told him as I told myself that a more missionary sort of appearance might draw an audience far less polite than us white-gloved Princetonians. Even SCOTUS Justice Alito had dared mouth disrespect to Obama's SOTU, hardly the elevated blindness of justice his robes should have embellished.
*****
I had briefly felt those warm cobblestones again, over the rainbow but beneath my bare feet one defiant summer in Cambridge so long ago. Women in Indian cloth, men bearded and mustached, sassing policemen in occasional clashes. What did that accomplish? A metaphorical kick in the stomach of the eternal feudal system, a concrete wall some of us will never stop trying to topple--there are so many Atlases among us, so many Sisyphus.
Remember JFK's cult of the boundless dreams of youth during his brief one thousand days?
Now money has usurped the prime of youth, heir of the airs. How did we let that happen? The college kids of the seventies tried to extend our reign, even among the Nixon years, even as that looming economic giant, China, was first stirred out of dormancy. Nixon was a liberal by today's standards in many ways.
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