Mr. Chair Man

"Oh, no, you can't go down there!" The freckles on her face begin to close in as she squints suspiciously. Frankly, I think of making a mad dash, but the climate is just too tense. Flinty-eyed guards holding automatic rifles dot the Capitol steps in a Code Orange stance. They look to me like they'd have no problem shooting a field-tripping sixth-grader for getting out of line, let alone a guy with a sit list of chairs from the Supreme Court to the War Room sticking out of his pocket.

"It's very rare that anyone gets to sit down there," the guide says.

But I can plainly see a family of five stretched out in several of the seats. One boy, wearing a bright green jersey, has his leg flopped over the arm of a chair like he's in his family room, waiting for Dad to pop in a DVD of "Drillbit Taylor."

"Who are they?" I ask. "Who gets permission to go down there?"

Even the little girl recounting the stars for the third time looks down over the railing, and asks, "Yeah, who are those people?"

"As far as I know, it's people who have done favors for a member of Congress or lobbyists ... people like that."

I don't know about lobbying, but I can do favors like nobody's business. Need a hand with that? It comes naturally to me. The thing is, those chairs can obviously be had, and I will have one. But first I have to make it over to the Supreme Court for the public lecture at 1:30 p.m.

* * *

"A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?"

-- Albert Einstein

The nine empty chairs lined up behind the winged bench in the Supreme Court are ominous, to say the least.

They make me recall my time as a juror on a murder trial. We were deliberating into the night and at one point found ourselves unattended in the dark, empty courtroom. A few giddy jurors hopped in the witness chair to do good imitations of bad murder witnesses, while I opted to climb into the judge's chair and soak it in. A day later, our verdict ended up being so atrocious that the judge slipped out of his robe and cornered us before we could get out of the building.