Queen Elizabeth II (Photo courtesy NASA)
I would hardly call myself an Anglophile. I mean, I like the Beatles … a lot. Yeah, well, maybe I’m a bit of an Anglophile, but not really in any sense a fan of the royal family. I do like madcap British humor, though, and as a reporter for the ever-cheeky Style Weekly back in 2007 — the year of quadricentennial commemorations and what turned out to be Queen Elizabeth II’s final trip to Virginia — it fell to me to find some way of appropriately memorializing the royal visit.
Oh, it promised to be a splendid affair. Pomp. Circumstance. More pomp. A bit more circumstance. Maybe even an extra dash of both for good measure.
But as the alt-weekly, it was hardly Style’s style to celebrate either pomp or circumstance. Best to lampoon. Or at least gently parody. Which was my plan.
My first pitch to editors was, I still think, my best.
My then-5-year-old daughter, Lilah, had recently declared herself the Queen of Cheese. She was particularly fond, during this period of her reign, of Parmesan and Edam. She ate a lot of it. And she regulated the rest of the family’s intake by insisting on dibs. She also, as is common with 5-year-old little girls, was pretty smitten with queens and princesses and fairy godmothers. So, it seemed an obvious goofball sendup to take the Queen of Cheese to see the Queen of England.
But my editors had other ideas. I was accused at one point of trying to use my job for personal benefit, that the whole affair stank of Stilton.
In any case, undaunted, I was ready with a second pitch.
Instead of taking one queen, whose claim to the crown was dubious at best, I’d instead take three queens — three queens whose titles were properly earned and recognized — to see the queen during her visit to Virginia’s Capitol Square.
The first was Joe’i Chancellor, the then-acknowledged “Queen of Highland Park,” known for her heart of gold and her street hustle, which included a variety of business ventures such as book writing and filmmaking.
The second was Nova Clinton, the reigning champion drag queen of Fieldens, then an after-hours gay bar on West Broad Street, who was known for a signature look that was more smokin’ soccer mom sizzle than high-camp vamp.
And the third was Tiffany Hazelwood, a genuine Virginia pageant circuit queen, whose reign was just about to end, but who was ready to go out with one last hurrah.
I documented our field trip in an article for the magazine titled “We Three Queens,” but there were some bits that didn’t make the final cut, mostly for space reasons, that remain with me as particularly vivid memories.
One was the “receiving line” for the general public arriving at Capitol Square that day to witness the queen’s official state visit. That receiving line, of course, was actually a security line that included a metal detector and pat down by Capitol Police.
What made this line particularly memorable for me was the big gray tub next to the table police used to poke through peoples’ bags and purses. It was of the kind that the TSA uses in the airport security line, and it was full to the brim with all sorts of weapons — from steak knives and brass knuckles to 6-inch stilettos and switchblades — that police had confiscated from Queen Elizabeth’s adoring fans. I watched as police discovered more than a couple of these, dutifully disarming their owners and then showing them on through the security checkpoint onto the Capitol grounds. All I could think was that about a third of the people I’d be shoulder to shoulder with were defanged would-be assassins, based on the hardware they’d arrived with that day.
Speaking of security arrangements, probably the best untold story of that otherwise generally uneventful official state visit was how Virginia nearly killed Queen Elizabeth II.
A couple of days after Queen Elizabeth’s departure, the dust was still settling when I got a call from a friend who’d been involved in the official detail of Virginia dignitaries that greeted the monarch at the airport on her arrival.
This friend — who will remain nameless, as they remain in a role where discretion is important — was still somewhat breathless in their retelling of what they witnessed.
“Chris, we almost killed the queen!” they gasped over the phone. “Seriously!”
The story went something like this: Rather than have the queen debark via the ho-hum banality of a regular airport gate, Virginia’s 400th-anniversary planners went for a classier entrance for Her Majesty.
The queen’s plane had landed and taxied to park on the tarmac. Dignitaries lined up in an outdoor receiving area adjacent the plane to greet the Royal She as she was to descend stairs on one of those airport trucks with the extendable stairwell, a la those famous pics of the Beatles arriving to conquer America.
So, as recounted, the plane taxis to a stop, and up rolls the staircase — apparently, the official term for these is an aircraft specialty stair truck. The assembled dignitaries watched as the truck jerkingly parked awkwardly at an angle to the plane. Up went the retractable stairs to the full height, level with the plane’s door. Except nowhere near the door. Once the stairs were extended, the driver proceeded to execute what my friend described as a “20-point parking job,” involving a series of jerking forward and backward maneuvers until finally the truck was generally lined up at the plane’s gangway door. Watching was torture, according to my friend.
At last, the moment had arrived.
The door opened slowly, and Queen Elizabeth II, in all her pearl-wearing, regal reverse-wave-greeting glory, appeared in the doorway.
She prepared to step onto the gangplank to make her descent when suddenly she stopped and turned, swiftly disappearing back into the plane as if remembering she’d forgotten to turn off the light in the Royal Lavatory.
Good thing, too: As she turned and disappeared back into the plane, those retractable truck-mounted stairs? They collapsed. Not all the way down to the truck bed, mind you. Not so dramatic as a full collapse.
But a drop of a good foot or two.
Enough of a drop that even a young, nimble gymnast — let alone a spry octogenarian — would have been hard pressed not to have sustained a fair bit of head and neck trauma tumbling to the tarmac below.
The truck’s crew quickly fixed their error, re-extending the steps and presumably this time remembering to set whatever locking mechanism they’d neglected the first time.
The queen returned to the doorway after a brief absence and resumed her regal wave and dramatic — but considerably less dramatic than it could have been — descent.
She probably thought all those slack jaws among the awaiting dignitaries represented adulation, not horror at what could have been.
And that was the day that Virginia nearly, and with finality, declared its ultimate independence from the British monarchy.
