Lesson #3: Cities are crazy. And so are cases.

Last night I was reading Judge Carlin's opinion of the 1941 Cordas v Peerless Transportation case. Let me give you an idea of what that was like...

 "It appears that a man, whose identity it would be indelicate to divulge was feloniously relieved of his portable goods by two nondescript highwaymen in an alley near 26th Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan; they induced him to relinquish his possession by a strong argument and hominem couched in the convincing cant of the criminal and pressed at the point of a most persuasive pistol."

He continues...

"If the philosophic Horatio and the marital companions of his watch were 'distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear' when they beheld in the dead cast and middle of the night the disembodied spirit of Hamlet's father stalk majestically by 'with a countenance more in sorrow than anger' was not the chauffeur, though unacquainted with the example of these eminent men-at-arms, more amply justified in his fearsome reactions when he was more palpably confronted by a thing of flesh and blood bearing in his hand an engine of destruction which depended for its lethal purpose upon the quiver of a hair?"

I am sure I was just about to get it when I started hearing...

 "I've never been in love before. And all at once its you. Its you forever more."

That song! The very song that my GUCI counselors made me sing in front of hundreds of my fellow campers on the Project stage circa 2000. I was about to chime in on the chorus when she abruptly stopped. Screaming! Yelling! Cursing! I, along with everyone in my building, raced to our windows to see what all the fuss was about.

Just a homeless woman with her shirt pulled up screaming profanities to a cop. No big deal.

Then came the sirens, more screaming, and a hell of a lot of apologies.

"I apologize. I apologize. I was just tryin' to get home. I apologize."

I don't think the cop bought it. Not a happy ending for the crazy, homeless woman or my future Broadway career. It was quiet. Eerily quiet. Quiet enough to get back to...

"The chauffeur - the ordinary man in this case - acted in a split second in a most harrowing experience. To call him negligent would be to brand him a coward; the court does not do so in spite of what those swaggering heroes, whose valor plucks dead lions by the bead, may bluster to the contrary."

The Court issued judgment for the defendant, dismissing the plaintiff's claims based upon the merits. Ten days' stay and thirty days to make a case.