The Washington Spectator
Nathan, George Jean
.............................................................................................................................................................................. THE WASHINGTON...
...a potato sack sport coat...
...The PETA people walked in circles amidst the crowd and the noise, carrying signs and shouting at the parents and kids as they passed: "Animals are suffering for your entertainment...
...There are things here you won't see anywhere else," Tom says, and he's right...
...Chas, who is PETA's Out-reach Director, was not quite so gentle in tone, perhaps because he's a veteran of the animal rights circuit...
...The clown told me his name was Stag...
...All I did was go limp when they tried to carry me out...
...Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey blew into town on a delicious spring evening, and though the big top has now.been replaced by the Armory, the festive air that everywhere attends the circus was unmistakable...
...But the highlight came near the pool, where a nice old man asked me to sit down with him...
...And did you know they don't have any vegetarian food in New York City jails...
...None...
...A poet from Cuba proved a special hit when it became apparent she was on special assignment for Fidel...
...I hope it helped when I assured him she's worth every penny...
...He got his class involved, and after a few years of travel to shore up his data base, he and his wife decided to settle the museum in Washington...
...I had entree into the secret world of the Nation's inner circle: Valley-girl valet parking, a Henry Moore painting hung over the living room mantel, a study lined with photographs of Stanley with George McGovern, Warren Beatty, and Raul Alfonsin...
...Oh, we get a negative reaction at best...
...potato money...
...There's this kind of mentality—a rodeo mentality, a circus mentality—that makes you subjugate animals, that tells you animal abuse is fun...
...It seems to me that Washington needs an identity...
...Sometimes you just want to shake people and say, `Hey—reality's not fun and games.' " —GJN THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 49...
...It's the same everywhere...
...His face lightened, how-ever, when he started in on Meredith Baxter Birney, the lovely star of TV's "Family Ties" who he said is his daughter...
...We're the focus of potato-eaters all over the world...
...As one local wag explains, "They have only two good writers, and they're both commies...
...On the grass outside kids did cart-wheels and climbed trees as their parents told them to come here right now!, while teenage girls sat cross-legged by the entrance, smoking cigarettes (in the warm night air you could smell their perfume...
...Nobody has a right to have a good time when another creature is suffering...
...and sundry less exotic items, such as a potato sack wire twister, a potato picker's belt, record albums, postcards, and several rubber potato fingers (for picking...
...They said I had, quote-unquote, resisted arrest...
...It helps also if you talk to Tom Hughes...
...Bologna, hamburger, that's it...
...Especially the kids...
...He said he'd just gotten out of jail in New York, where he'd been arrested for pro-testing at Macy's fur department...
...I'm here to enlighten people to what they're doing...
...The animals won't...
...I had that chance last spring, at a Nation party when the magazine had just turned 119...
...The problem is, you have to think about it for a real long time...
...Tom began in 1979, when he was teaching fifth graders at the International School in Brussels...
...Like a Communist system, the Nation magazine operates on two levels...
...I wandered over to talk to a clown who was chanting, "Come and watch animal abuse, fun for the whole family...
...He knew Reagan in the old days, when they played bridge and did charity events together...
...The occasion was a USC conference on opinion magazines, specifically a Saturday evening reception for select participants hosted by Nation Southern California stalwart Stanley K. Sheinbaum at his Brent-wood dacha...
...That's why we have the museum...
...You funnier looking than me...
...It struck him, of a sudden, that there were "no museums or libraries preserving the heritage of the potato...
...an operation was keeping him off the tennis courts, and, more important, his political travels weren't much fun anymore, especially to China where things just haven't been the same since Mao's death...
...Adelle apparently never met the kids in my old neighborhood, but I let it pass...
...And if I found him little-known, well, he also happens to be a member of the Senate Finance Committee (which, if I didn't know it either, is handling tax reform...
...In reality it serves the interests of its nomenklatura, as in the $1,000-a-plate dinner it threw for its real backers right before the big event...
...Vendors with booming voices hawked pennants and balloons...
...He looked out over the clown nose that was strapped to his face...
...Christ...
...Kids don't want to see animals suffer...
...Why can't Washington be the Hot Potato...
...Lately Fields was feeling a bit down...
...I fasted for three days...
...She was obviously his prize, not only because she was a wonderful mother of five and a loving wife to David Birney, but because she felt so bad about making so much money when all around there is so much starvation and unemployment...
...I've been doing the circuses for years, mostly in Miami," he said...
...I didn't have time to watch the video Tom has put together about how the potato has figured in movies and television (remember Marilyn Monroe dunking potato chips in champagne in The Seven Year Itch...
...Clearly, he's never had a chance to sample the magazine's charm...
...Bowing to pressure nonetheless, I've done some additional checking and now I'm ready to admit that Senator Mitchell deserves to be even better known...
...Damn right I'm a partypooper...
...As he wandered off with his parents the clown said to him, "Have a nice time tonight...
...There's no excuse for animal abuse...
...Boycott the circus...
...He was Jack Fields, Hollywood agent to Asner and other stars...
...but he did get a chance to explain, as we sat at a table with a wicker bowl of potatoes between us, how you "begin to think of potatoes in this way...
...He picked up his megaphone and aimed it toward the kids on the grass: "The circus is a child's fantasy, but it's an animal's nightmare...
...Potato Head set (first toy marketed on TV...
...I asked Adelle, PETA's Media Relations Coordinator, how people were responding...
...the prototype—not a copy, but the prototype—of the Two Tater Time Clock...
...The museum occupies the dining room and spills over into the kitchen and the den of his two-story townhouse on Capitol Hill...
...There was a woman who was leaving at midnight for Managua...
...At all...
...They had me in jail for three days, man...
...But the cops in New York . . . it doesn't matter...
...In theory it exists to serve the masses, as in the 120th anniversary party it threw for 3,000 blind followers in New York on March 18...
...Apart from anything else, that's a lot of self-congratulating for a political sheet that in this town is read with interest only inside the FBI building...
...But I knew about that, including the Senator's standing as the eighth of nine Democrats on the committee...
...A brassy little boy echoed his chant, and then dismissed the clown with a wave of his arm...
...The circus is fun, man...
...But maybe this will stick with them, you know...
...New York, of course, is the Big Apple, but the potato is far more nutritious and versatile than the apple...
...Ed Asner was there, skulking between the buffet and a VCR showing an anti-contra documentary...
...You crazy, man," he said...
...Three days...
...Going on and on in this column about Washington's extremely active animal rights movement may seem like flogging a dead horse, but when I heard that PETA, People for- the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was picketing the circus, I felt duty-bound to have a look...
...Turns out he's what one source terms a "lefty": his image is respectable enough, but you should see how he votes...
...After all, Mitchell is a former federal judge and one of the Senate's most respected members...
...THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR No lunches this month, but I did get a call from Senator George Mitchell's press secretary who said he was "appalled" and "really disappointed" by the "incredibly condescending" treatment his boss received in this space last month...
...This is my first one in D.C., but I've done rodeos here, animal labs, what have you...
...a potato necklace...
...a rare bar of Idaho Spud Candy...
...I asked Stag whether he ever felt like a party-pooper, being here at the circus, trying to make people feel guilty when they just want to have a good time...
...Here everyone deals with hot potatoes every day," he says...
...No vegetables at all...
...Tom, a mild, friendly man happily unburdened by the fevers of a zealot, has devoted not only a museum but a life—his--to the potato...
...We're the voice of the potato...
...I closely examined a mint condition Mr...
...Yet you go into the Smithsonian, you won't find anything about spuds...
...The idea of devoting an entire museum to the potato is not that crazy, if you think about it...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
