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COVER STORYOct. 20, 2006

The Mayor’s Detail

Experience what it’s like to travel in the Williams entourage.

By Jason Cherkis

(Illustrations by Kyle T. Webster)

You are blessed to work in the capital of the free world as a “vice president,” a “special counsel,” a “special assistant,” a “general manager,” a “director,” or a “chair.” These titles mean that you have done things in the world. More important, they may arouse Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ interest in traveling with you. We recommend the Samsonite X'ion 22-inch Expandable Upright.

You’ve made it onto the plane. But don’t expect to find your assigned seat up front next to Williams. That seat is reserved for his wife, Diane.¹ You may get lucky and snag a seat right behind the mayor. If you do, and you happen to be a really commanding figure, he will stow your carry-on baggage for you. Watching him shove your bag into the overhead compartment, you will think that he is “polite” and “helpful.”¹ After takeoff, though, he is more accessible than he is in the District, and you will be happy to have “exploited the opportunity.”¹

Once on the ground, before you engage in discussions of tourism,² trade,² and infrastructure,³ you will travel in either a van or a bus. Williams will be shuttled off in a secure car.⁴ The conditions of the van or bus will largely depend on the host country’s GDP.^2,7 From that moment on, you will rarely see the mayor from less than 20 yards away. You will politely think that he does “somewhat segregate himself from the others” and joke that you’ve been left in “steerage.”⁴

After settling into your host city’s accommodations, you can expect an early start time. The mayor begins his day in the wee hours, sometimes as early as 5 a.m., in an attempt to keep you “on task.”³ From your vantage point, you will determine that the mayor is “seriously focused,”³ “pretty focused,”⁶ and “spot-on the majority of the time.”⁵

When the mayor visits the set of the Icelandic children’s show LazyTown, he will not stop focusing on the tasks at hand, like meeting with the mayor of LazyTown, sitting in the mayor of LazyTown’s “office,” and watching LazyTown videos.¹ He will understand the concept of LazyTown, specifically that town hero Sportacus must prevent archnemesis Robbie Rotten from making the town’s children fat and dumb and lazy.¹ There will be talks to bring the show here, but that will just be talk because the District doesn’t have the money to import an Icelandic children’s show.¹ But oh, how “absolutely terrific” the mayor was on the set.¹

The mayor, you will find, is not so terrific when it comes to delays. Developing countries pose a particular problem in that schedules run as smoothly as their roads. After visiting a town in Ghana, the mayor and his delegation were caught in a rainstorm and could not fly back to D.C.’s sister city Accra.^2,3,5,7 This made the mayor unhappy.^2,3,7 The mayor had to ride roughly 130 miles with the delegation on a “rickety” bus with “no bathroom” and “not much” air conditioning.² If you are stuck on a bus like this, singing may break out, but it won’t be for too long,² because you will find that your fellow deputies and midlevel managers and councilmembers can’t carry a tune.^2,3 Thankfully, the whole bus will bond over the experience.² If you happen to sit next to the mayor’s daughter and you end up playing spades with her, expect plenty of trash talk.⁵

There will be few opportunities for close interactions with your delegation. Instead, you will be doing a lot of watching and listening. You will marvel at the vastness of it all when visiting a city like Shanghai.^2,4 Or you will listen to your various counterparts discuss their infrastructure needs.³ If you are in any way associated with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, you will find yourself taking a 2 a.m. tour of Accra’s gutters and catch basins.³ You will walk away from the experience thinking “we are very fortunate that we have the advanced water system that we have.”³

Don’t worry—there will be plenty of occasions to be a part of international ceremony. Embassy dinners are par for the course,^3,5,8 as are host meals provided by various other dignitaries.1–^5,7,8 If the mayor gets sick—as happened in Senegal—he will not show it.² The mayor will attempt to eat anything put before him, no matter how mysterious the platter.² In return, he will sometimes try to confuse his hosts by mentioning D.C.’s lack of representation in Congress. You will notice that nobody responds to such topics.⁵ Remember: Washington is the capital of the free world, not a colonized playground of the federal government.

During such meals and ceremonies, the mayor will be lavished with all kinds of gifts. His daughter might be made a princess, as she was in Ghana.^5,8 You will also notice other trinkets, and you may joke that upon return we “melt down” the keys to these cities and “make D.C. plaques to give for when he goes to other places.”¹

If you’re lucky enough to have some D.C. councilmembers in your entourage, you may hear a snicker or two referring to the mayor as “Ambassador Williams.”⁴

The mayor, though, will let you engage in your own homemade cultural exchanges. Perhaps before you travel to Ghana, you will find a picture of the country’s president with President George W. Bush in an issue of Jet (the one featuring James Brown). The mayor will not care if you go up to the Ghanaian president and ask him to autograph that issue of Jet, telling the leader: “You in good company; you’re with the hardest-working man in show business.”⁸ The Ghanaian president, you will find, knows about the Godfather of Soul.⁸

Maybe at the end of such a trip to such a country, you will remember what you do for the District as a commerce-and-trade muckety-muck, and you may think it “was disappointing”² and explain it this way: “From a tourism perspective, they aren’t traveling. And they aren’t going to be traveling.”² But you will also recall that trip to the Frankfurt auto show and relish the memory of sitting with the mayor at a small dinner. You will find him fascinating,² and you might share your respective backgrounds and find things in common—that you both had fathers that served in World War II, perhaps. “He shared some of the problems that his father had as an African-American soldier,” you will recall.2 “There’s this real sense of pride…I felt a sense that there was no anger or hatred in him about that.”²

Even months later after your travels with the mayor, you will lay awake in your own bed at night and marvel at the experience.⁸ You toured great and proud cities with the mayor of the free world, and you will think: I can just see those days, getting up in the morning nonstop, treating us like the president coming into the country. Man, that’s heavy stuff.⁸ CP

¹ Peggy Cooper Cafritz, president of the D.C. Board of Education

⁸ Robert King, special assistant, Department of Parks and Recreation