How I Met the Queen
Her Majesty didn't have a lot to say.
Since everybody is talking about the Royal Family this week, do you want to know how I met the Queen? Sure you do.
It was the 1990s. (I looked like the picture above back then.) I was on my way to Eastern Europe for work and made a stopover in London, where friends put me up for the weekend. I went to the Tate Gallery and killed some time, checking out a few exhibits before going down to the lower level (to buy gifts, I imagine; I don’t remember). I climbed the stairs back to the main floor, and when I reached the top a man in a uniform placed his hand directly in front of my face.
Now, say what you will about that particular gesture – I, for one, don’t care for it at all – but it certainly dominates your visual field. It also has a strong element of surprise. As a result, my reaction was the intended one: I froze in my tracks. As I did, a woman with graying hair crossed my field of vision on the other side of the man in uniform (who, as I now saw, had a number of colleagues on hand).
The woman who passed before me wore a suit in the color known as heliotrope, if memory serves me well. (It was almost the color of the one she’s wearing in the picture above, but not quite as bright.) In the suddenness of the moment, all I could absorb was that she looked familiar. She looked like she could be a friend of my mom’s, since they were about the same age. And so, on impulse, I addressed Her Majesty the sovereign monarch of the former British Empire as follows: “Oh, hi!”
She turned with what seemed to be a look of disdain, gave me a cursory nod, and kept walking.
Let’s cut to the chase: She was shorter than she seems in pictures. All famous people are.
As it turned out, Her Majesty was at the Tate to present the Turner Prize, given each year to a British artist. The recipient that day was Damien Hirst, who had achieved a certain infamy by preserving animals in formaldehyde – often dissected, as he did with a horse – and exhibiting them as art. I’m probably doing his talent a disservice with this description, but it’s all the same to the poor animals anyway.
That night, my hostess was aggrieved. “I’ve been British for 42 years,” she said, “and I’ve never seen the Queen! You come for the weekend and say ‘hello’ to her!”
“Not ‘hello,’” I corrected her. “Hi!”
“That’s even worse,” she said.
“No, what’s worse is that I don’t even like the monarchy.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, I suppose.”
Still, there was a symmetry to it. A “royal” house that once made an art of butchery was now reduced to honoring butchery as art.
And that’s how I met the Queen.