At that moment, Alex Lemon, 19, a deputy in the church's marketing department, stood on the sidewalk trying to attract some of the lunch-hour crowd. Most passersby did not break stride as they smiled vaguely at his invitation: "Hello, sir, would you like a stress test?"
"I'll break your meter" is the response Lemon said he often hears.
Up stepped Hashim El-Tinay, 58, the head of a D.C.-based foundation dedicated to studying Africa and the Middle East. After handing El-Tinay the poles, Lemon asked him what he was thinking about.
His mother and father, his sisters and "various" girlfriends, El-Tinay answered. And another thing: "I'm thinking about how stressed you are to find out how stressed I am," he said, chuckling.
Ella Capaldi, a paralegal who lives in Columbia, sat with another tester, Astrid Reeves, 37, who asked her to think of things that cause her stress. The needle jumped to the right.
"I haven't focused on anything," Capaldi protested.
Reeves smiled.
Capaldi said she loves her husband. They had just returned from vacation. Work, she said, "is a piece of cake." Everything was swell, except for the fact that she has to wake up in the morning to go work. "That's a pain in the behind," she said. She passed on the offer to buy the book.
A few minutes later, Kenny Blake, 24, a Shaw resident who works at a commercial laundromat, slipped into a chair, across from his tester, Terry Dechaunac, who sells antique rugs when he isn't volunteering for the church.
"You got some stress you want to tell me about?" Dechaunac asked.
Blake smiled. "You know that," he said, mumbling about his relationship with a former girlfriend.
Dechaunac reached for a copy of "Dianetics." Blake took a look at the back, then announced, "I don't have no eight bucks. That's why I have stress. I don't have money."
That was a fib, he confided after strolling away. He had the money, just not the interest. "Everybody goes through stress," he said with a shrug. "You just got to deal with it."
