Thursday

My favorite moments from yesterday came before and after the great evacuation,* though that was fun. Beforehand, we were standing in the Thai weaving tent at the Folklife Festival* when I noticed a woman crouched on the ground looking for all the world like she'd lost a contact lens. Sure enough: one blue-tinted hard contact was around there somewhere. What I like about this story are of all the people who began chipping in to help. Minutes after I stooped to sift through the sun- and culture-blasted grass, there was a whole ring of strangers blocking the area off to foot traffic. After several minutes, the lady found the tiny glass disk where it has fallen into her cleavage, and the group disbanded. Not one person uttered "I must have been looking right at it." After the evacuation we ate Malaysian dinner up 19th Street at Panang.* I had a clay pot of tofu in brown curry gravy and octopus salad. After dinner, we found a nice, uncrowded corner of Constitution Avenue to spread our pink Hello Kitty blanket and watch the best fireworks show I've ever seen. The first moments were comparable to the crescendos of most other municipal July Fourth displays, and for the next fifteen minutes I was rapt as palms of burning glitter lit up inside coronas of expanding stars which, in turn, burst fractally into multicolored fires and comets that trailed all the way into the crowd around me. Pieces of blackened, smelly cardboard casing rained down on us. It was awesome. The whole crowded Metro ride back was alive with the smell of sweaty gunpowder. A quick note: I'm leaving today for Readercon,* a literary convention near Boston. It is unlikely this Update Column will return before late on Monday the ninth. [Cavin]