Kids and Pudding
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Virginia Beach, VA
The time Benjamin and I spent in Maryland yesterday and earlier today carried echoes of our time as roommates after graduation, trying to become heroes of the page, first in a cramped eighteenth-floor apartment in Silver Spring, then in slightly more decent quarters in Rockville. Those were the real figuring-out years, and I felt the ghost of them, first as we braved treacherous traffic crossings at Silver Spring, then today when we (with Jenny) wound up at one of the many shopping plazas in Rockville along the Pike, chancing to eat at a diner that Benjamin and I had enjoyed back in our days as Pikers. The Silver Diner, most venerated of greasy spoons, and a venue that proved its worth in typo content while we stood in line waiting for our table. Jenny watched, bemused, as Benjamin and I almost simultaneously shouted out our discoveries and headed in opposite directions, he to a poster on the wall, and I to the daily specials chalkboard.
Benjamin had, it turned out, discovered two typos in the same poster (click to enlarge).
“I’ll only fix the Rocket one now, though,” he said. “I need to do some research to confirm whether there is only one Coloring Contest, or several.” And so Benjamin, white-out grasped firmly in hand, made the following correction:
Meanwhile, I had glimpsed the first occasion on which the Typo Correction Kit’s chalk would be useful. Witness Sunday’s dessert special at the Silver Diner:
Clearly, for the sake of the diner’s widespread reputation (who else could have won the privilege of hosting the Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization’s annual fundraiser, “Hadassah Runs the Silver Diner”?), I needed to take action. I gestured at the young man trying to keep the queue of patrons in order, and said, “Can I fix the spelling of ‘puding’ on your board? I’ve got chalk with me.”
Ahead of us in line, the teenage girls tittered.
After registering only the barest surprise that I was actually carrying my own chalk, he blinked at the sign and said, “Oh, yeah. It’d be good to fix that.”
I performed my service with some haste, as we were about to get our table. I think my chalk was a little thinner than the one that had been used to render the erroneous spelling in the first place, but it does jes’ fine in a pinch, it does:
In the space of a few short moments, Benjamin and I had dispatched two typos with ruthless efficiency. This augurs well for the days to come, I thought, and we went with Jenny to stopper our arteries with the delicious glop of the most unhealthy brunch foods mankind has ever devised, served by a kind and capable man with the improbable name of Victor Hugo.
Benjamin probed a staffer whose name tag read Edison (Tom to his friends, I imagine) for greater detail on the promised Coloring Contests– was there only one, or would there be multiple, perhaps involving a series of elimination rounds to determine the ultimate colorer? After deciding that Benjamin was probably not a pederast, the guy gave him a sheet with more details on not just Coloring Contests, but all sorts of Nights for Kids. Kids Nights… no, Kid’s Nights… but which kid? What?
We wept for a few moments at the vile new array of errors and inconsistencies. Then we went back to eating our food. On the way out, Benjamin, armed now with the information that there would indeed only be one Coloring Contest, made his final adjustment to the sign, only afterward realizing that all the activities had long since expired and they’d probably be taking the sign down any day now.
We had in fact come to Rockville with a specific goal in mind, one that Benjamin had suggested once he saw my fieldwork at the Filene’s Basement in Boston. “We need to determine,” he’d said with a fierce glint in his eye, “whether those mistakes are happening at the store, or whether they’re coming down from corporate. We need to visit another Filene’s Basement.”
This was an eminently agreeable suggestion. It wasn’t too late, I realized, to make up for my cowardice back in Boston. So it was that we entered Filene’s Basement, Mid-Pike Plaza Rockville, on a mission of reconnaissance. I present to you the damning evidence we gathered… see if it looks familiar.
Yes, these are the same exact errors I glimpsed in Boston. Typos are being handed down from headquarters as gospel, propagating the errors many times over throughout all the branches of this celebrated institution. There is only one thing that can be done about such a topdown, overarching problem, and we will do it.
In the afternoon Benjamin bid goodbye to Jenny, and then he and I were off, driving down through Virginia to the last place for a while where I can expect the kind of cosseting I’ve been receiving so far on this trip, before we move on to a stretch of camping. We arrived at Benjamin’s parents’ house in Virginia Beach just in time for some chili and the opportunity to at least attempt to explain to them the bizarre motivation for our journey, and the surprising developments that have thus far arisen from it. Tomorrow, before departing this town for the coast of the Carolinas, we’ll see if we can spot a typo or two to give Virginia a moment in the sun.
Totals
Typos Found: 16
Typos Corrected: 9