Larry David at the Carousel

If you do only one historic thing when in Martha's Vineyard, ride the carousel in Oak Bluffs. If you do only one histrionic thing in Martha's Vineyard, get into a fight about it.

One week ago, I spotted Larry David walking past the carousel. Undoubtedly he was there not for the ride but for the annual Fireworks night. Larry David, creator of Seinfeld, is now the star of his own HBO show about his own curmugeonly self. This afternoon, while biding time before our ferry home, I got involved in the type of kerfuffle that Larry David apparently experiences on a daily basis.

The line at the carousel wasn't long, but the teenagers who run it are not interested in expediency. They don't try to fill empty seats on the ride, so the line sometimes clogs up with large groups who want to ride together. The result was that we were the second group of four to enter the carousel when our turn came. The first group all took seats on the far end, leaving a nice collection of four horses right in front of us. The big kids grabbed adjacent mares, and Shirra and I went about getting seated behind them. First, however, Shirra had to fasten the strap on Maeve's inside horse, so I held the outside horse to indicate that it was 'taken.' Suddenly a large blond girl of about 9 began to mount this horse, so I explained that I was saving it, indicating with a gesture that my family was all sitting together. She persisted a moment before I asked her again to find a different horse. The next thing I knew, she was sobbing like a 4-year-old and pointing at me.

Her father and mother came over, asking why I'd made her get off the horse. I tried to explain my side of the matter, but clearly it was no use; Blondie kept bawling until I told her that she was far to old for whingeing, at which point she suddenly stopped. Her parents, however, continued to speak forcefully about my rude behaviour (they were British). I repeated my sweeping hand gesture to no avail, and father (or 'fahthuh') told me that he was going to report me to the pimply staff, which had the same effect on me as when Philip told me that he had chosen a new best friend in fifth grade. After the useless teenagers conferred with each other and then with me, the five-minute-long ride finally started, approximately five minutes after it should have. The reformed blubberer was put at the head of the line for the following ride, and her parents continued to glare.

Just as the ride began, a second woman standing nearby chastised me, saying that she'd seen the whole thing. I didn't mind that she had stated her opinion, but I was peeved when the ride ended to discover that she may have been biased: She was Blondie's aunt. We would have had nothing more to do with her had it not been for the fact that Fiona had managed to grab the bronze ring -- the prominent feature of this carousel ride -- entitling her a free ride. The rest of us filed off the carousel, Blondie ran to her favourite horse, and we stood by, waiting for Fiona while Aunt Snaggletooth spoke in a stage whisper to Mum about white trash, people these days, and Fiona's ring-grabbing technique. It was at this point that I decided to have a chat with her, but before we had said much to each other, Uncle Halitosis came between us and told me to get out of his wife's face. I pointed out that she and I were having a conversation and that he was the one who was, in actual fact, in his wife's face. With strong hints of sarcasm, he acknowledged how clever I was (a point that Brits always make when confronted with logic), but Aunt Snaggletooth decided that this was looking like an affair for the police and asked a bored teenager selling popcorn to make the call (which he promptly ignored). I am sure the cops would have gotten involved had I phrased my next few arguments to Uncle Hal correctly, but I decided to avoid having to withstand a punch from him just to have him arrested. It would have been a wonderful bout of irony: How often is it that a wife calls the police to have her husband arrested for hitting a stranger, I wondered.

Ironically, despite the Aunt's conviction that we were exhibiting incivility, it was Blubbering Blondie's papa who verged past blue into somewhat violet prose when he dropped an F bomb on Shirra. She only told me about this later, which was lucky because I have a feeling that if I'd known about this during my conversation with Uncle Hal, I would have definitely gotten myself punched in order to get him arrested. I would only have had to ask myself, "What would Larry do?"

This may sound like grandstanding, but there is precedent. On a long train train ride in Australia 18 years ago, I took a drunk, older man to task for smoking in our non-smoking car. After he flicked his lit cigaret at me and then lunged at me when I continued to chastise him, I got him kicked off the train. We made an unscheduled stop, dropped off the old coot, and continued. I found out later that the train only goes thru that town once a week. So don't mess with me! Grrr.