Abortion or Bust!

WASHINGTON - Being eccentric and outgoing is a job requirement at Kansas City International Airport.

Breath befouled by a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza (Supreme, natch), I proceeded to the airport newsstand to buy some tic tacs. No sooner had I set the mints on the counter than the charmingly grizzled old lady clerk says loudly and enthusiastically, "SO, you need some TIC TACS, do ya?" I smile and nod at this statement of the obvious. She rings up the purchase. "That'll be NINETY-FOUR CENTS."

I hand her a dollar bill. "That'll be six cents comin' back to ya. Not The Sixth Sense, six cents."

I think about asking her if she sees dead people.

But then I figure discretion is the better part of valor and beat a hasty retreat. The aforementioned pizza was a reward for my stomach, which had set to growling after learning my flight was going to depart an hour late. The old gastrointestinal system had been looking so forward to a vacuum-packed travel pillow masquerading as an airline sandwich that it demanded food now, or else.

Getting the pizza is a story in itself. There's a pretty normal-looking woman behind the counter at 10 a.m. when I ask if I can get lunch this far before lunch time. Her colleague with the piercing stare and the vaguely eastern-European accent says somewhat reservedly, "It'll take six minutes to cook one." She must have thought we were in a rush, not knowing we were cooling our heels while the flight crew finished its FAA-mandated rest period. We had till noon, so I told her to take her time.

Oh, she took her time, burning my pizza while she served my traveling companion his piping hot, delectably greasy masterpiece of frozen-food technology. Before this the first woman, the normal-looking one, asks me where I'm from. I say Nebraska and she proceeds to tell me how she went up there recently and it snowed! In April! "Ma, send me a TICKET! Get me OUT of here," she says, by way of recollecting her chilly Cornhusker State nightmare. I say something about how she'd best get out of the Midwest if she doesn't like that kind of weather. I'm figuring, I think with reasonable cause, that she must recently have moved to Kansas City, because Ol' Man Winter sneezes all over that fair city pretty often, too. But no, she's lived there all her life. She's turned off to Omaha forever, though, because it snowed in April.

I was in Kansas City with a friend who writes for another newspaper because we both wanted to cover the oral arguments on Nebraska's partial-birth abortion ban before the Supreme Court. But we wanted to see the Washington, D.C., sights as well, so we left on the Saturday before last Tuesday's arguments.

Hail thee, mighty electron
We had planned to make the 22-hour drive to D.C., but a handy service called Smarter Living saved us from pancake-flat, aching rear ends and the 10 pounds we'd gain eating iced animal cookies on the way.

(Those pink wonders from the Keebler Elves are God's perfect travel food. They're sweet, but not so much they make your teeth hurt; they're filling; and you can leave the bag open a week and they won't get stale. For those of you who like more natural foods, as do I, you'll be glad to know the ingredient list includes no words with more than three syllables.)

The Smarter Living web site lets you sign up for a service that compiles all the last-minute Internet-only airfare specials from the major airlines. You select the departure airports you're interested in, and every Wednesday you get an e-mail listing where you can go, for how much and on which airline. Most of the fares are for travel that weekend, leaving on Friday or Saturday and returning Monday or Tuesday. But every now and then my personal Holy Grail of Internet airfares appears: the asterisk, which when found next to a fare means it's available for dates other than the coming weekend. Some hugely cheap vacations to far-flung lands can be had this way.

So last week as I was contemplating how to keep blood flowing to my legs for 22 hours on the road, I checked my e-mail and behold! there arose my salvation on electron wings. A $169 fare to Philadelphia, just a $40 Amtrak fare away from my final destination. Regular airfares were running from $600 to $1,200.

(In case readers of my previous report on getting cheap airfare with Priceline are wondering, I did not reveal my low ticket price to a single fellow traveler. I've learned my lesson.)

So we got to Philly, wonderful land of weekend motorcycle races on public streets (not Harleys, but speed-freak Kawasakis), gunshots in the night and razor wire everywhere. Having lived on the Temple University campus for two weeks a few summers ago, I didn't want to stay long. So we hopped the $5 SEPTA train to the Amtrak station, bought tickets there on a handy self-service machine as pigeons flew around indoors and were off. But not before looking around the food court and finding not a single place that sold Philly steak sandwiches. Go figure.

Continuing our streak of cheap-travel luck, we called 1-800-HOLIDAY from Washington's Union Station and got an $89 weekend rate at Holiday Inn Central, mere blocks from the White House. Had there been telephones with data ports in Union Station, I would have searched the Internet for better hotel rates. Might even have used Priceline's name-your-own-hotel-rate service. Using the telephone -- a cellular, granted, but a telephone nonetheless -- felt soooo low-tech.
The rest of the trip up until the Supreme Court arguments is sort of a blur of aching feet and stiff calf muscles, because we walked nearly everywhere, the Washington subway stations are really far apart, and taxis are for weaklings. We did have two outstanding meals and one politically incorrect tavern experience, which I will detail for you in case your travels take you to our nation's capital.

Haven't met a rude French person yet
First was dinner from the $18.95 price-fixed menu at Bistro Francais in Georgetown. For that paltry sum, which is cheap for that quality of food in the Midwest and a miracle back East, we got a glass of house wine, mussels nicoise, our choice from a list of 10 entrees, and dessert.

I could not decide between the rabbit and the duck, so I asked the waiter's preference. Without hesitation, "Ze dook." So I had ze dook, and it was perfection on a plate: thin slices of white meat with a generous layer of fat on the left, a solid slab of dark meat on the right, all wading comfortably in a shallow pool of tart raspberry sauce. The mussels appetizer consisted of 10 (ten!) huge mussels swimming in a garlic-butter sauce. The service was excellent, the maitre d kindly seated us although we were underdressed and 20 minutes early for the 10:30 p.m. start of the price-fixed menu, and I highly recommend the place. The addresses and telephone numbers of all the places I'll talk about are at the end of this story.

Dining by the numbers
The next night we went to the Adams Morgan district, walking right by the National Zoo where six people would be shot the very next day. Freaky. As always, we were in the mood for culinary adventure, so we went to an Ethiopian restaurant, Red Sea. There were two other Ethiopian restaurants within half a block, which seems just as economically unworkable as the three Greek restaurants within half a block of each other in Lincoln. Yet there they were, and Red Sea was closest. So in we went.

We discovered to our delight that Ethiopians don't use utensils. They pick up their food with pieces of a spongy, floppy bread called injera that's just a little thinner than a pancake. Food is served on a big communal platter from which everyone can grab what looks good.

Ordering the food was almost as fun as eating it. The waitresses all dressed in what I ignorantly assume is traditional garb, beautiful white sari-like dresses. I like lamb and tried to order yebeg wat, "succulent lamb simmered in red pepper sauce, with ginger root, cardamom, garlic and exotic spices" (I grabbed a take-out menu so I could get all these details right and not take notes at the table. That's so gauche.) But I must have mangled the pronunciation particularly well, because she said suggestively, "Okay, the Number 3. Now, which two vegetables?"
I took the hint and ordered the A, the non-Ethiopian term for gomen, spicy chopped greens in oil, with onions and pepper. I honestly could not adequately recognize the ingredients in any of the eight other vegetable dishes, so I asked the waitress what she liked. "The H." Okay, the H, which turned out to be yemisir azefan, spicy green lentil puree blended with ginger, garlic, onion and hot chilies and "touched with mustard." Now the funny part came when my friend couldn't decide on his second vegetable, and he asked the waitress what she liked. "Oh, definitely the I." So my friend and I glanced at each other in wonder, because she'd just recommended the previous letter in the alphabet to me. But he still ordered the I, otherwise known as carrot dinich -- carrots and potatoes cooked with onion, ginger and green pepper. (They must have about as much ginger in Ethiopia as India has curry.)

The only dish that tasted most like something I'd had before was the A, which was nearly identical to Southern American collard greens. The 3 reminded me of lamb curry at The Oven in Lincoln, but it was much milder and slightly watery. The other dishes -- especially the H -- are impossible to describe, but I promise they were tasty. So if you're ever in Washington and you've got a hankering for adventure, go to Red Sea. You only have to remember three things: 3, A and H.

Elian Gonzalez
Right next door to Red Sea is Madam's Organ, which according to an advertisement I'd seen offered half-price Rolling Rock beer to redheads. Back in my elementary-school days, when I had even fewer social skills than now and weighed about 300 pounds, I was teased mercilessly about my then-bright orange hair. No amount of repeating "Carrot tops are green!" would dissuade my tormentors. So I figured it was about time to drown my years of suffering in beer I could get on the cheap because of my once-hated coiffure. Poetic justice.

Little did I realize the visual experience that awaited me. Dead animals -- fish and fowl, marine and mammal -- festooned the walls. A street sign pointed the way to "Letcher Avenue." Formal portraits of important-looking white guys competed for space with a Picasso-like composition of gaunt, naked women. One of the daily food specials was Buffalo wings, advertised as -- I'm not kidding -- "hotter than your sister."

But the best part was the chalkboard advertising the drink specials. On this Sunday, just one day after federal troops stormed in to seize a young Cuban boy (does that make them stormtroopers?), those who like mixed drinks could order the Elian Gonzalez Shooter: Cuba Libre with a shot of Cuervo tequila. Price: three Yankee dollars.

* * *

The addresses, as promised:

Bistro Francais, 3128 M St. N.W., (202) 338-3830

Red Sea, 2463 18th St. N.W., (202) 483-5000
Madam's Organ, 2461 18th St N.W., (202) 667-5370

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This piece originally appeared April 30, 2000, in Nebraska StatePaper. You can see the original article here.