The George Washington Hotel

jimmoyer

jimmoyer
Apr 3, 2005
5,101
22
38
68
Winchester Virginia
www.contactcorp.net
Thinking of birthdays at the end of April...

The George Washington Hotel lives again.....after 30 years of being either empty or barely used for some formerly homeless...

A Gala Black-Tie Opening.

All the beautiful people getting out of their beautiful BMWs, LEXUSs, Cadillacs leaving the keys to the concierge to park. 90 rooms.
Beautiful inside. Georgeous. Two huge wall murals of elongated figures playing and singing jazz.
Marble floors. Columns. Roman arches overseeing an indoor Pool.

A very slim older woman with Aristotle Onassis style thick glasses, slinks to the floor and has to be carried to her room. Drank a wee much. A soldier to the Cause. Salud, we raise our glasses.

At a bar, like an altar of sacrifice to the Gods, its bar of marble, its backdrop going high to the cieling way high up.

Opulence. Romantic.

People in Tuxes and Ballroom gowns, staying overnight.

Flat panel screens in some of the smaller conference rooms showing the black and white past where people move in jumpy cartoon ways. The past. The past. The past. 1920s when over 7000 people would debark from that train station across the street to honor Confederate's Day, the day Mosby died.

A day that others around the country know as D-Day.

The Dancing Goat restaurant under the hotel has a showoff kitchen to watch the Chef pirouette his way to your pallette. And the aroma ? To die for !!

And the conversation ? Scintillating. A view of the can-do in life. A vision of the higher altitudes.

And this war ? Whoooah !! What is it good for ?

Hoo yeah...the complexity of life, as miles away a new 20 year old journeys The Trail, discovering something, wanting something no one in the family or this or that town could show her.

"And what of that beautiful painting of those mountains?, " an abstract painter asks of me, pulling me out of my revery of what's going on the Appalachian Trail.

"What?"

"That picture", he points.

I look.

I now know from a friend of mine what all abstractionists know about pictures. They're flat.
Just shapes on a flat surface. Illusions ?

"Well duh...", some slinky dressed sparkly eyed woman clinks her drink to her man's drink., smiling in agreement.

Hmmm, do we want to get into this ? Plato said Socrates wondered how you could ever describe a chair to someone who has never sat in one.


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Happy birthday again, Ashley.

Just a story for you.