A Meeting in DC...Hurry Up and Wait! (6 of 7)

Cellphone Silliness!

Well, I told my brother to pick me up around 3pm even though I had forgotten the correct arrival time.  Because I didn't want to interfere with his work schedule, it would be a two hour wait for my brother to arrive. I spent those two hours at a bar nursing a seven dollar Abita Amber and sketching.

The two women illustrated were both on their cell phones most of the time they were in the bar. I couldn't tell if they were actually doing business, talking to friends, or just being coy. They were on the phone when I arrived at the Live Oaks Tavern and were still there on the phone when I left two hours later.

My brother, Hilton, lives a few miles east of the airport and everyone in the family uses his "taxi service" to save a few bucks on parking at the airport. The airport, Louis Armstrong International, is an airport that has never, ever been completed. It's not like the airport is growing in leaps and bounds because it isn't. It's just that nothing ever gets completely finished here. One change for the better is remodeled to a change for the worse and then readjusted when something else is added. This cycle of never ending change has been going on for, at least, thirty-five years.

As we disembarked our Embraer 150, I noticed the woman I sketched on the plane in DC who was reading a book as we waited and waited for takeoff. I told her that she was my best subject on the flight and she laughed.

"I saw that you were drawing most of the flight, so I figured I was one of your subjects," she said.

I asked her if she was a New Orleanian though I knew she wasn't. She had that well scrubbed look of the midwest... quite prim and proper. She said she was from Ohio and was visiting her sister for a birthday celebration. Then, I asked her, in my most southern gentlemanly way, if she'd like to see the sketches I did of her, but she declined making an abrupt turn to the ladies' restroom.

As she distanced herself from me, my parting shot was," Hope you enjoy your stay in my hometown!"

I don't think she heard me.

Copyright 2011/Ben Bensen III