It’s better than a mass e-mail

I opened the refrigerator in my house the other morning and was greeted by three neon-colored bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (oh, how I miss my old roommate Ricky who sure loved him some MD) and three bottles – one a toxic blue color – of Boons Farm wine.

Now, we all have our MD 20/20 and Boons Farm memories. If you’re not overflowing with stories of those sordid nights, then perhaps you were too inebriated to remember. Just the mere sight of the screw-top, white-labeled, fruity Boons Farm bottles brings me right back to high school, schwilling from the bottle with my girlfriends atop Winn-Dixie Hill (a.k.a. Make-out Hill) on the golf course (sorry, Dad). Boons Farm was the only booze we could stomach, and as I got older, I found maybe 85 percent of the women I met got drunk for the first time on BF.

And MD 20/20 made frequent appearances at my college house, though I am proud (and honest) in saying I never partook. Ricky loved it and shamelessly toted the bright bottles to parties. And I think he did it mainly as a joke, a party trick, a novelty kind of like the Alize poster we had taped up in the living room. We only wish we had street cred.

Herein lies my point. I am no longer in college and high school is a distant (OK not that distant) memory. And those two beverages had been so far from my beverage repertoire – until now.

Excuse me while I climb up on my high horse.

Really, I just saw the bottles, asked one of my roommates if I was seeing things, and laughed out loud at the absurdity that is my living situation. Enter my sense of humor.

I live with five other people, most of them only a little younger than myself, but it is very much a group house. Grimy countertops, garbage piling up in the kitchen next to a cooler of warm beer from beach trip two weeks ago, six jugs of milk in the fridge (three of them expired) and a random pile of white sheets near the washer that no one will claim.

For a while, every other day I would come home to a new roommate. Justin (the roommate I really like) called it the revolving door apartment. He’s funny – drinks a lot of coffee, is always high and giggling after work, loves karaoke. Then there is a girl who is always – and I mean always – in her housepants and has two caged birds in her room (don’t even get me started). Some other dude who doesn’t say much. Ever. Then the dude who owns the house, who seems to have a horror movie obsession with African art. Seriously, we have 17 carved wood salad spoons with giraffes on the handles, maybe 43 masks and safari animal statues all laid obsessively on the tables of every room. I think he did a semester at sea. He, the 23-year-old kid who just bought a 5-bedroom house in Washington – again, don’t even get me started.

This place is awesome.

Yesterday I was writing a story on the Central American Free Trade Agreement for the three Alabama newspapers I write for.

The challenge was to make a convoluted and excrutiatingly boring issue interesting to my readers, many of whom live in small, rural towns. And I would say that when reporters are writing national stories for a local audience, all we want is a good anecdote to lead with. Why should people in West Alabama care about CAFTA.

Enter Betty Sparks. One local judge gave me her name and number (after my colorful, ultra-quoteworthy conversation with him) saying she worked in a local cotton mill most of her life but was laid off two years ago thanks to NAFTA (and CAFTA would have the same affect, he said… Stay with me here).

Here’s how the call went:

Me: Hi Ms. Sparks? This is Sara, I am with the Tuscaloosa News.

Betty: Oh now I don’t need to by the paper, hon, I don’t even have a job!

Me: Oh no ma’am I am not calling to sell you the paper. I am a reporter and I want to talk to you about the old cotton mill.

After about three minutes of me trying to explain why I was calling (without getting mired in words like CAFTA and trade agreement and global competition) and dropping the judge’s name, she finally decided to talk with me. I think it was that I talked to the judge, because when she realized that she eased up and chatted. I got my lede for the story and a great quote about how her town now is a “tumbleweed town.”

Writing for Alabama papers, I have some of the most interesting sources. They say colorful things and they are so kind (or at least they sound nice with the thick Southern drawl). One woman’s name was Twinkle – and she was the state GOP chair! No kidding.

Last night at about 1 a.m., I was awoken by a series of loud bangs. It shook me out of sleep and before I even sat up I knew it must have been gun shots.

I appreciate that I tend to think every loud pop in our neighborhood is a gun firing, but this sound – followed my that of a car speeding away – was definitely gun shots.

I peaked out the window and saw nothing, and laid back in bed, thinking surely it was nothing. A few minutes later, I see the reflection of police car headlights blinking on my ceiling and I can hear the characteristic police issued car engine pull up the street and stop. Spitting distance from my window.

For the next few minutes I watched as several cops patted down two young men, who clearly were just walking by and had nothing to do with the shooting minutes before. After a while, the police let them go, peering around the street with a flashlight, and eventually driving off.

I guess I will never know what happened. Instead I went back to sleep asking myself, do I really live here? Sure, that scene could have played out on any other block in Washington, DC, but there is something extra shady about this neighborhood. The potential for crime – or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time – is palpable.

This weekend, I went to a party for the Journalism and Women Symposium, a.k.a. JAWS, and I have never seen a such a large collection of bad asses in one place.

JAWS is basically a group for women journalists to come together and support each other, offer job advice and guidance, discuss the journalism issue d’jour, and just generally be total bad asses. At this party, I was in total awe of these women from some of the most respected media outlets in the country. I met women whose bylines I recognized, and was impressed by their humility, generosity and openness.

One woman in particular, a Washington Post reporter named Jackie Spinner, spoke to the group. She is one book leave from the paper to write about her time in Iraq. She looked my age (but was clearly older, since she said she was at the Post for ten years before heading to Iraq), and had started as a financial reporter before being at the right time in the right place. If my memory serves me correctly, she broke a story about the prison abuse at Abu Graib and lobbied her editors to send her to Baghdad.

They finally did and she spent about a year there. Three days before she left, one of their informants who was basically being paid to make sure none of the reporters got killed told her that he had been offered $5,000 to tell the insurgents where she was. She knew then it was time to leave.

The book she is writing is a joint venture with her twin sister, who is an essayist, called “Tell them I didn’t cry.” It refers to the time she was almost kidnapped. One day she was approached by these men who started yelling at her in Arabic. When she didn’t respond immediately, they grabbed at her, tearing her scarf and dress away to see she was wearing a Kevlar vest. They then tried to abduct her, until she was saved by several Marines. She was shaking and crazed, but she didn’t cry – a point she urged the Marines to back her up on when they returned to the office.

One of the other things she said that stuck with me was the fact that she never identified herself as an American – always Canadian or Ukrainian – and she never reported directly – always working through a translator, which meant her standing by as he conducted the interviews, trusting that what he relays is the truth. Also, if they did say they were reporters, they always identified themselves as being from some fake Iraqi newspaper, never the Washington Post. When asked if that made her uncomfortable, considering the shaky state of journalism ethics these days, she said of course it makes her uncomfortable, but that basically she is more effective alive.

Good point. After all that, she is returning in September. What a bad ass.

Walking home tonight from Capitol Hill, I stumbled upon a handful of cops pulling cars over about a block from my house. Now cops in this area aren’t a common site, unless they are cruising H Street, which seems to be the dividing line between the nicer area and the, well, less nice area (my neighborhood). South of H Street is newly paved roads, renovated row houses, playgrounds. H Street is run-down strip malls and liquor stores and on the way to my lovely abode is a somewhat shadier scene that posh Capitol Hill.

Anyway, being the sharp reporter I am, I asked one of the cops what they were up to. He (kindly – rare for Metro cops) said they were doing safety checks to make sure people had driver’s licenses, buckled seatbelts and insurance. Surely this neighborhood has bigger fish to fry, but I guess showing some kind of police presence counts, and perhaps they knew that.

So the officer was very nice, and he asked me what I thought of the neighborhood. I told him my assessment of the H Street division, and how when I first moved here I was nervous. But less and less do I feel like a total outsider. Save for the occasional incidents that make me want to crawl into a hole, apologizing profusely on the way down for being white, I am beginning to feel more a part of this neighborhood. I am less afraid of walking home from the bust stop at night. I see the same women standing with me at the corner in the morning, the same young men wheeling around on Schwinn 10-speeds or hanging out on the corner in their white T-shirts. The same group of old men is always sitting in fold out chairs and on steps near H Street. And the same woman – thought mean as fire – is walking her tiny puppy each morning.

I just make a point of looking people in the eye and saying hello, and I feel like once the shady folks see that I am unfazed by them and that I live here too, the tension is diffused. And almost every time they are kind back to me.

After chatting with the cop for a few minutes, I thanked him and told him I appreciated seeing them out on the streets. In a city like DC, it shouldn’t be so rare.

In other news, I went to a Congressman’s home for some Northwestern dinner party thing (free food) and the highlight – besides the gorgeous home with original floors and window shutters that folded into the wall – was him running out before the party was over. After answering the phone, he came lumbering down the stairs, suit jacket in hand, sweat dripping from his forehead. He said he had to run out for a vote. And he was gone. Now that’s exciting – democracy in action, folks.