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The Queen Has Pubic Hair

September 24, 2009 11:15 PM

thought this story--about Justice Sotomayor getting lost on the way to Washington--was sort of interesting. What I like about it is that it gives us this strange sort of glimpse into the mundane details of the daily lives of one of the most powerful lawyers in America. In her career on the Supreme Court, Justice Sotomayor--like all of her colleagues--is likely to make a good amount of history and will influence the interpretation of our most important documents for decades to come. But here we're presented with a moment where she's clearly just "one of us": she's a person trying to get somewhere she hasn't driven to frequently on a dark and stormy night. And then you compare that image, which we've all been a part of, and contrast it with the other anecdote in the story--the one about Sotomayor picking up the phone and hearing the President of the United States on the other end--and the whole thing seems even stranger.

I've always thought that the contrast between the extremely powerful positions some people hold and the people themselves is interesting. For example, should anyone so much as threaten President Obama, he'd have twenty of the world's best-trained security guards at his side, ready to take a bullet. But what happens if he's giving a huge speech to the UN and he realizes that he probably shouldn't have drank that much water beforehand because now he's really, really got to pee?

A British person I went to law school with once told us a story that someone he met in a bar told him. I have no idea if it's true, but it's still one of my favorites. I forget exactly what the premise for the whole thing was, but basically the storyteller produced a small box. Inside that box was a short gray hair. Everyone asked why the guy carried a gray hair around, and he explained that he used to work at some place in England. One day, the Queen came to the area and, as luck would have it, she had to use the bathroom at the place that the storyteller worked. For some reason, it fell to him to clean up the bathroom directly after the Queen was done. And there, on the toilet seat, he found one of the Queen's pubic hairs. I swear that when my classmate told the story, there were sufficient details to make the whole thing sound much less made up.

But the point is that the Queen has pubic hair and that there's probably been a moment when the President would really rather have been sitting on the toilet than meeting some head of state, and that's such a strange thing to think about.


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