MANDY FLYNN: If only I had had a cell phone

A few weeks ago, a rat carrying a slice of pizza down a flight of stairs to the New York subway became a sensation. Overnight, this little rodent captured the attention of millions thanks to the quick thinking and amateur video skills of a guy with a cellphone. Twenty, 25 years ago, I bet no one would have believed him.

“Hey, I was walking to the subway this morning and there was this rat dragging an entire piece of pizza about three times as big as he was down the stairs,” he might have told his wife two decades ago as he deposited a quarter and called her from the payphone on the sidewalk. “No, really. I swear! What? Oh, you need to hang up so you can dial up to the internet? I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with that. This internet thing will never catch on.”

Times have changed.

I bet if I think hard enough, I could come up with dozens of things I’ve seen that I wish I’d had a cell phone handy to snap a picture or take a video because no one believed me.

For one, the dog wearing a t-shirt and a hat that was sitting by my car one afternoon after school. I tried to talk to him and see if he had on a collar, but he left before I could get close enough. I never saw him again. I did tell my friends about the encounter and was heralded with a few laughs and one concerned soul who told my teacher she might want to check on me. She asked me if I’d had a fever.

Then there was the clown in full clown makeup wearing no shirt and riding a child’s scooter on the side of Interstate 16. I would never have stopped the car to talk to him, but I would have taken a video a safe distance away or at least a photo if I knew hours later no one would believe me.

“Are you drunk?” was the response I got. No, no I wasn’t. But I suspect the clown may have been.

Some things, you have to just keep to yourself. Some, you just can’t.

“Alice was at the airport!” I blurted out. “Alice!”

It was with unabashed enthusiasm I shared with whoever would listen that I had seen Alice – Linda Lavin – at the Albany Airport. Albeit, it wasn’t “kiss my grits” Flo, but, at the time, Linda Lavin was still a big superstar at the height of her primetime celebrity. I couldn’t get anyone to share my excitement in my awesomeness siting. It didn’t help that the one other person who was with me didn’t see her coming out of the ladies bathroom like I did. If only I hadn’t really, really, really had to go to the bathroom, maybe I could have told them soon enough for them to get a glimpse.

“Maybe it was someone who looked like Linda Lavin,” they said. “What would Linda Lavin be doing in the Albany Airport?”

Oh, if only cell phones had been around. I’d have taken a selfie with Alice and shown them all. Then I would have asked her how Flo was doing.

Today, with all the new technology and instantaneous spreading of events all over the world, there’s almost no excuse for someone to witness something extraordinary and not be able to verify it. Kind of takes away the mystery, but helps prove some of us aren’t crazy, too. Things that happened in the past, I just have to live with the fact no one may ever believe me.

Please, if anyone happened to be driving down Interstate 16 circa 1986 and saw a clown with no shirt on riding a scooter down the side of the road, let me know. Hey, maybe it was even you.

I won’t judge. I’d just like to take a selfie.

Email features columnist Mandy Flynn at [email protected].