Vignette 2

My clothes were fine when I spoke at a fairly glittering event at the Cooper
Hewitt, all the buttons properly buttoned, but...  I had a lot of trouble
getting uptown, wound up having to take 3 subways and then running across
Central Park South, where the horse-and-carriages are located.  It was
raining, I was liberally splashed with water that was really a mud and horse
dropping soup.  I cleaned up as best I could, but for the rest of the evening
I represented the preservationist as stable hand.
(No one was impolite enough to mention it.)