| A
Rusty, Smelly Reston |
| Everybody has their own idea of what Reston is, or what
it should be. |
| Take the producers of the new TV show on Fox, "The
Lone Gunmen," which aired its first episode last Sunday
night. |
| The show is a spin-off of "The X-Files" based
on three strange little men who help the two heroic and uncommonly
somber FBI agents keep tabs on an underworld of government
conspiracy. |
| In the preview of "The Lone Gunmen," the father
of one of the strange little men lives in Reston, where he
is apparently killed as part of a government conspiracy to
crash a jetliner and send demand for defense systems sky-high. |
| Ah, but The Lone Gunmen are too smooth, and they head to
Reston to investigate. |
| That's about the part when anyone who knows Reston in real
life, knows this ain't Reston on the TV show. |
| The guy's father, first of all, dies when he drives his
car at a high rate of speed into a very solidly built concrete
pillar holding up what appears to be an 84-lane highway in
Los Angeles. (The show was filmed in Canada, I think, so I'm
sure they had to fly in a portion of the Los Angeles expressway
for the shot.) |
| The Fairfax County Parkway isn't quite finished yet, so
we know there is no such super-highway-to-the-moon in our
beloved community. |
| But if there was any doubt about whether this show was providing
a true depiction of Reston, it evaporated for everyone who
knows Reston about halfway through, when the three strange-little-men-turned-investigators
head to ... |
| Why, the ABC salvage yard in Reston, of course. ABC is a
hundred-acre junkyard filled with gargantuan rusted beasts
lifting metal by the ton with magnets the size of Herndon,
tearing the life out of old Dodge Darts with claws of sheer
steel, and smushing anything they want into teeny metal boxes. |
| Now that's what Reston is missing. A salvage yard. Finally,
all those long weekend drives to Triangle would be over. |
| However, the show did have some true-to-life representations
of Reston. Our own Pat Macintyre, artist extraordinaire, sold
a painting to the producers which was featured on the wall
of the home in which the guy's father was to have died. I
say "was to have died," you see, because he didn't.
There, I gave it away. Sorry. |
| And Victoria Reid, co-owner of the Reston Used Book Store
on Lake Anne Plaza, also provided some Reston knickknacks
that were to be in the show. |
| The Observer was contacted for the show about a year ago,
and we gladly provided them with several copies of the paper
to be used as props, then watched intently Sunday night to
see if at last we had hit the big time. |
| We didn't, as far as I could tell. And that was our one
big chance for our paper to become a star. Darn. |
| Anyway, Pat Macintyre's painting was featured on the wall
of a home that on the inside looked very much like a house
in Reston. |
| But enough about what was. Let's talk about what could be.
What would Reston be like with a salvage yard? Now that's
a question the candidates running for the RA board should
be answering. |
| Where would it go? How long would it take before we could
find the right guy to run the place, a crotchety 56-year-old
man who looks like he's 112, with a huge pot belly, a nasty
attitude and the breath of a fella who never takes his cigar
out of his mouth, even when he's sleeping? |
| If that had been part of the Reston vision, I think we'd
all be living in a different world right now. |
| As for the highway overpass, I'll bet that will be something
the RA board can wrestle with over the next 25 years or so. |
| And the next thing you know, someone will want to build
an international airport just 10 miles outside of town. |
| Like I said, everybody's got their own idea of what Reston
should be. |
