In Washington last week I had lunch with a magazine editor who had moved to the city several years earlier from New York. On his arrival a friend had told him that life in DC, after life in Manhattan, was a bit like life on lithium. There are no great highs, his friend had told him, but no terrible lows.
On the street, people looked responsible, respectable, intelligent. It was not unusual to see young men in khakis and button-down shirts. The most attractive women wore glasses. Occasionally an older gentleman would appear in a bow tie. Clothing that would get you stares in South Florida seemed perfectly acceptable in Washington. It seemed a place where it was hip to be unhip. Or a place that had dispensed with the whole idea of hip.
One day I walked into a bar near Dupont Circle. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, and the bar was its opposite: dark and musty. One woman sat alone in a booth, writing in a notebook. Behind her, another young woman typed on her laptop. At the bar, a third young woman sat with her head buried in a book.
This for me constituted a great high.
