Number Six, Please Turn to the Right part 2

In order to eliminate hair color, length, and style a police officer walked down the line and distributed shower caps. Not just any shower caps, but multi-color, krazy pattern shower caps.

So there we sat, ten of us in a row, wrapped up in to our chins in smelly wool blankets with shower caps on our head waiting for the witness to try to pick out the guilty party.

In the men's session, the witness failed to identify the suspect. But in the women's session, the witness identified suspect number six and of course suspect number six was -you guessed it- our very own Julie. (How could anyone ever think that little angle-faced Julie was guilty of anything?) Later, Julie joked that she was all offended becaused the accussed women was at least ten years older than Julie.

The night before when we told our daughters about our debut acting job here in Hong Kong, we had to explain to them that if the witness picked one of us, we would not be arrested. But after Julie was i.d.-ed, she did have to stick around for an extra half hour to fill out paperwork attesting to the fact that she was not in the vicinity on the night in question but was just an actress hired to stand in the line-up.

For giving up our entire Saturday afternoon, we each recieved HK$580 -or about US$70. That and one heck of a memory.

-Jack

When we had the details emailed to us late Friday night, the instructions stipulated that participating men could not have facial hair. I had to decide whether I wanted to keep my beard of three months or have the chance to be part of a Chinese police line-up.

My beard never stood a chance.