Things I Learned from James Bond

Or, The Doug Wamble Ramble

A few weeks ago, I went with friends to see Harry Connick, Jr. The venue was an outdoor park, and the six of us congregated there and waited for the show to start. At the last minute, the show's organizers had announced an opening act. It was to be a fellow named Doug Wamble, who plays a kind of loose acoustic jazz/blues.

One of the group I was with not only knew who Doug Wamble was, but went to high school with him. High school was a while ago, and the two of them had lost touch. But once the connection had been made, it was the topic of conversation throughout the night.

The show ended, and my friend decided that she should go find Doug Wamble. All of us had been drinking (not excessively, but enough to make all of this extremely funny), so we went with her on what's now known as the Wamble Ramble. We left our table and ventured over to where we thought Doug might be — the tour buses.

At this point, I began thinking about James Bond. When I was about twelve years old, I read all the James Bond books; those are like crack to a teenage boy. I bought all of them in paperback, and I'm quite sure I drove my parents batty by my repeated trips to the bookstore every third day or so to get another two or three books.

I now remember very little of those books, but one piece of advice they offered has stuck with me. If you don't know where you're going or what you're doing, acting like you do — walking at a determined pace and without looking like you're lost or otherwise clueless — can get you a long way. I'm not sure if the others were aware of this particular piece of advice, but that's what I was thinking about when we embarked on our little quest.

Shortly, we were stopped by security. He asked us where we were going, and the Wamble Ramble instigator spoke up for all of us. She said, "we're trying to get to our cars."

Look like you know what you're doing, I'm thinking.

She was very confident.

Security guard buys her story, and proceeds to walk us to the back gate. He doesn't know, and we don't say, that our cars are clear around on the other side of the park. He lets us out, and we mill around. Now, we're still carrying coolers full of ice, food, drinks, and the like. That stuff's starting to get heavy. And we have a long walk ahead of us.

Fortunately, the night was cool. We soon happened upon a large chain link fence.

Trouble.

There was a gate, though, and it happened to be open. The chain and padlock were there, but the gate wasn't locked. We scooted on through. Lucky for us, because if we hadn't made it through that gate, we'd have had to double back — and I'm not at all certain the security guard would have thought so much of the "getting to our cars" story the second time he heard it from us, especially since we'd then be walking in the opposite direction.

After a bit more meandering, we made it back to the cars, and the night proceeded uneventfully from there. More drink, lots of good conversation, and the recollection of being thwarted by a security man who seemed to be taking his job a little too seriously.

Coda: my friend did manage to get in touch with Wamble. She called his agent.

So that's what I learned from James Bond. Look like you know what you're doing.

It's too bad, though. One might suppose there were a lot of other more interesting things I could have picked up from 007 but didn't. Bond was always good with the ladies. Plus, he had some cool toys.