It seems this town got it into its head in the ’30s that hosting a World’s Fair shouldn’t only be for cities that didn’t need the boost or the two-way exposure to the world. So, it applied to host one. And was ignored.

But they built one anyway, researching customs from around the world, creating small wooden pavilions to represent thirty-six countries, complete with snack stands where you could buy international foods, craft demonstrations, even little hotels of many nations. They taught themselves, via lessons on 78 rpm records, how to speak the various languages. And they kept the fair going for far longer than the one or two year lifespan of properly ordained fairs.

Over a period of decades, the world took notice. Hip guidebooks from the post-war ’40s caused tourists from “represented” nations to visit when they came to the US. Often, they were surprised by how right the villagers had gotten their customs and and crafts. Sometimes, they taught villagers the right way to do things they’d been doing wrong. In a few cases, international visitors stayed, finding this small world a better world than the big one, after all.

I don’t know what the town’s name was at that time, but now it’s Exposition, Va. It’s a medium-sized tourist destination, but in this country knows anything about it.

Except Congressman Henry Waxman.

I mean, it was an accident I got elected last time, a joke almost. Not my joke, but the joke of the people who put me up for office after I made that video, the first thing I ever did that went viral. At least I thought it went viral. Now I realize it went bacterial and I’m the one who got sepsis or peritonitis or whatever it is you get when you’re overrun with bacteria.

See? I don’t even know THAT, really. It’s all references where I’m concerned. It sounds like I know something, even to me, but there’s no depth to my understanding.

And that’s what happened with this CONGRESS thing. I thought I could do it because I have strong feelings, but there’s a whole process you have to work and I don’t have a work ethic, I have a craft ethic. I’ll spend as much time as necessary – ’til I lose interest, anyway – if I come up with some wild notion or other, but the nuts and bolts of anything is beyond me.

I tried to explain that to Henry about a week later as we walked through a wood shack World’s Fair from the ’30s in the distant regions of Loudoun County, part of his one-man mission to save me and the institution I’d been ruining. He said my self-awareness meant I WAS equipped for the job, that the tea party lunatics who’d commandeered our process were the true passionate incompetents, the ones who didn’t know what they were doing but thought they did, whose belief in belief itself, stemming from an ignorant misreading of religious faith, trumped fact and threatened the existence of society more than Islamic terrorists or my lazy-ass bohemianism ever could.

But I just wanted to know about this wood shack World’s Fair. What the hell was this? How did this happen? Why did it smell so good? Was somebody cooking something Russian?

“Andrew, why are you here, anyway?”

Waxman, the guy on his way out, and I, the guy who’d just come in, were, I guess, bonding.

“You invited me, Henry, don’t you remember?”

I thought I was pretty funny, but he just felt I was dissolving the bond.

“Seriously, Andrew. Everybody’s been talking about how little you seem to even have tried to accomplish since you came to Washington.”

“Really? Everybody? I didn’t think most of the reps even knew me.”

“Well, okay. They don’t. But I’M everybody. I want to leave this body as close to the position of honor I found it in as I can and I can’t do that if jokesters and slackers are filling the seats on our side.” (I know my relating of this makes him seem uptight and proper but, though these are his exact words, he came across quite Jewy and warm.)

“Sounds like more than one person you’re talking about, but you’re just talking about me, right?”

“Right,” the Angeleno schpritzed “chocolate death” ice cream direct from a teat into his mouth.

“I know you’ve had a truncated term,” he admitted, “but you’ve got to start stepping up to the plate. It’s already time for you to start gearing up for reelection.”

“I’m not even sure I want reelection,” I said glibly.

The Republican reps were on one side of the room while we Dems clung to the other, a central gutter of empty tables running between us, as we eyed each other warily, like the Jets and the Sharks. I broke out a couple of modern dance moves — punctuated by a “pow” or two — in the center de-delicatessenized zone, but people glared, sans passion or understanding, so I headed toward the bathroom.

Speaker Boehner was in an alley-facing doorway, smoking.

“That’s why I like you, Lederer, you go right to West Side Story.”

“I didn’t think anybody knew what I was doing.”

“You’re right, nobody knows what you’re doing. But I certainly knew what you were referencing. I played Bernardo in summer camp when I was 12.”

“Is that when you discovered the self-lacquering device I imagine I’m not supposed to talk about?”

“Don’t tell Leno,” he laughed.

A few feet away, a waitress brought Iowa’s Steve King a cantaloupe.

“I didn’t order this.”

“Compliments of Congressman Lederer.”

He looked up and I nodded like a gambler in the old west. On the their side of the gutter, the Dems saw the melon before the anti-immigrant rep and sonically mocked with passion, none moreso than the members of the Hispanic caucus.

“That was for you, Bernardo,” I told Boehner as I entered the toilet.

Waxman’s one of those Jews who looks like a Mexican, making him perfect for success in Los Angeles politics. It might be an evolutionary adaptation, as when flowers have petals that look like beavers. After all, many New York Jews look like Puerto Ricans. Could be Jews are genetically programmed to mimic the predominant Latin population wherever they reside. Probably this started during the Roman occupation of the Holy Land, when it was useful not to look too conspicuous to the original Latins. This was likely also the beginning of the overlapping characteristics which undergirded the close Jewish/Italian relationship in 20th-century New York.

Then again, I may have been programmed by cartoons and old television comedy to see Mexicans as looking (and sounding) like Mel Blanc. Perhaps Mexicans don’t look like Jews at all. If that’s true, though, why are there Jews who look like Puerto Ricans?

Wait. Maybe it isn’t Jews who look like Puerto Ricans, maybe it’s Puerto Ricans who look like Jews.

Like, you know, Hector Elizondo.

Don’t know when I’m going get a doctor to check on this swelling that’s been growing in pain for weeks now. First I have to choose a primary care provider from the network of my DC exchange plan and it takes time to comb through credentials (as anyone who’s switched plans knows). Other reps are annoyed they had to move to an exchange-based plan, though they themselves mandated it to demonstrate I’m not sure what. But I think my new private insurance is cool, since until this year I had pre-expansion Medicaid.

Yes, I was that poor.

Now, I’m a-travelin’ through the muck with the muckety-mucks. Like, last night, I got to attend what will presumably be the last of Henry Waxman’s annual Super Bowl parties. I never went to any of Phil Spector’s bowling parties, but THIS tradition I’ll have touched.

Haven’t agreed with Waxman on everything, but he has, in many ways, been a great man through his 40 (count ’em) years of service to the nation. He was my congressman in L.A. and I remember affixing my “I Voted” sticker to my bare chest and feeling a great deal of pride after doing my part to keep him in the chamber, doing (mostly) what was right.

Only time I ever met him before entering Congress was in the Beverly Connection Souplantation at lunchtime, when the House had recently turned Republican and he was wondering if, powerless, he should go on. This was during the Clinton years.

Twenty years later, he legislates still, and will continue through the year. If they let him.

He must look back at THAT spell in the minority as a glorious epoch of power.

At breakfast with a bunch of the New York gang after the last afterparty (including an increasingly regretful Grimm Reaper and Eliot Engel with no combover at all), I told Engel I had figured out his “gotta be in front of everybody/aisle seat” thing. It’s not, I announced (not just to him, but to Jerry Nadler, Nydia Velázquez and anyone else not face down in a Double Croissanwich), that he wants to be seen on TV or be close to political power. It’s that he likens The President of the United States to The Torah, the word of God that has guided the Jewish people for lo these thousands of years.

A Bronx kid like Engel would undoubtedly have clamored past the Yiddishe dowagers and delicatessen owners to kiss the Torah each time it came down the synagogue aisle on Sabbath or holy days of his youth. Eventually, the smart-as-a-whip (but not The Whip — that’s Uncle Steny) future politician would have realized an aisle seat GUARANTEED Torah access. And as his child’s belief in God morphed into a grown up belief in democracy, his feelings for The Word would — as any shrink will tell you — be transferred to the human representative of an American’s dreams and desires. “Ladies and Gentleman, The President of the United States.”

I swear I saw Eliot kissing a book and touching it to the president’s sleeve in the aisle before the SOTU address. You can probably find it at c-span.org or YouTube.

Or underneath the mistletoe.

Last night.

That wasn’t at the party, though. She said it to me earlier, after the president had finished speaking, as the members and guests were filing out of the chamber. She also told me I should have someone lance my boil. Do they even do that anymore?

Anyway, it’s not a boil, it’s an infected bruise. I think. I mean, what’s a boil?

The Speaker probably wouldn’t have been so disappointed by my professional ineffectuality if she’d known how much traffic my SOTO presponse had been generating. People weren’t finding it funny or anything, they were mostly commenting on my “boil.” Still, I was being noticed.

Just as SHE had noticed I’d been hangin’ out with Mike Grimm, kidding him about how, since Staten Island was almost New Jersey, his indictment for corruption was close to certain. Pelosi was probably as unhappy about my spending time with “The Grimm Reaper” (as we like to call him) as about my absence from the legislative fray. Don’t know if I got him stressed out with my joking about the corruption thing, but it was right before he lit into the reporter from NY1. Then, after he threatened the guy, he was mad at me for not backing him up.

But he was WRONG.

Plus, I realized I was probably also one of those people he figures he can break in half like a boy, so I felt a sense of solidarity with the reporter, who I now think of as “my fellow boy.”

Eliot Engel, my colleague in the New York congressional caucus, gave me 75 bucks to hold his seat in the chamber while he was interviewed on MSNBC a couple hours ago, being palpably desperate to maintain his traditional position as ridiculous sycophant in front during the president’s State of the Union address tonight. As a veteran of the first iPhone line (Soho store), I was the ideal choice, though it galls that I was paid more to wait for the iPhone than the Prez.

Pre-“State” hubbub has, I don’t mind telling you, provided me with much-needed distraction from the pain of swelling above my mouth, in the spot where that Tea Party guy hit me a week or so ago. The swelling is beginning to look a lot like a small ball (which, due to the texture of my skin, is more Pennsy Pinky than Spaldeen).

I guess I should go see a doctor. I woulda gone today, but Eliot NEEDED me. Meantime, between the waiting and the swelling, I was bored, so while I seat-filled for Engel, I recorded and uploaded my response to the president’s address.

Why would I record a response to a president of my own party? And why would I do it in advance?

Well, aside from the fact that, in my opinion, there should be no “official” response from anyone (since the chief executive’s address is in his capacity as president, not partisan), it’s pretty clear this year’s four “official” Republican responses were written in advance as well. So, what exactly are they in response to? I decided that if various Republicans could pre-craft responses to something they hadn’t heard yet, I should trump them with a response both written AND disseminated before the event.

Perhaps I should have called my address a “PREsponse.” If it goes real well, maybe next year I’ll be asked to do the “Rand Paul Response.”

It can’t ALWAYS be delivered by Paul.

I live a life that straddles both sides of dismissiveness, my balls hanging directly between the inherently unworthy and those rendered unworthy by their disregard of me. If the balance of these races is sufficient, I feel free, surrounded almost exclusively by people who don’t like me and people who don’t mean anything anyway, kinda like the world is to begin with.

In such a world, I can do whatever the fuck I want. And the congressional Christmas party provided such a world, a room filled not just with the Yolos and the Stockmans, who deserve neither attention nor respect, but also worthy legislators of all power levels who, at best, don’t know why I’m around. As hired carolers piously harmonized on paeans to MangerBaby (named by God for the phrase used by Italian mothers to get their children to eat), I tried to induce the twenty-odd Jewish members of the House to sing, as a kind of rebuttal, our favored Chanukah songs..

“Is it legal to sing that religious stuff on the grounds of the Capitol?” I asked no one in particular, in a less than resonant voice. “Where’s the ever-popular ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ repertoire of inclusion?’ I wondered. “I demand equal time!”

“What?” a caroler asked?

I answered, in the manner of my clan, with a question: “Don’t you know any Jewish songs?”

“No, but I can follow on my concertina if you want,” he shot back with ridiculously unnuanced Christian sweetness.

I started on “Oh, Chanukah, Oh, Chanukah,” but didn’t know any of the other words, so I switched to “Ma O Tzur” for a word or two. Jerry Nadler continued for a few words more, then HE stopped. The concertina guy looked to me for guidance as silence overtook us all.