Best of the District: The Best Place to Pick Up Prostitution: The Four Seasons

In the mood to mingle with Z-list celebrities and congressmen you’ve never heard?

Neither were we when we found ourselves sipping champagne at the bar at the Four Seasons Tuesday night.

To our surprise, it was packed, and while we have to hand it to them for making a weeknight feel like Friday, the scene was so sleazy that we thought we’d walked onto the set of an 80s DC thriller.

The bar itself had the whole dim lighting, minimal décor, and low couches that practically scream, “We don’t sell beer for less than ten dollars.” (Although our date was happy to learn that an Amstel was only 6 bucks.)

The crowd was decidedly older: a mix of thirty-somethings and really old men who looked like they’d snuck out of their nursing homes for the night. Men (who far outnumbered women) clumped around the bar in sharp suits and watches you don’t wear when you’re in it to help people.

The women all looked like aspiring actresses. They’d lost their natural youthful beauty, and they all seemed to have independently decided that the best way to get it back would be to flat-iron their hair and then go back in and curl a few random clumps. (We seriously didn’t know people wore their hair like that outside of TV.) Their skin-tight dresses all stopped two centimeters below their vaginas. We were a little worried no one would be able to tell any of them apart.

We watched a New England Senator hit on a very pleasantly plump lush who was having trouble mixing gravity with a barstool. Every so often, we’d see one of the women help one of the octogenarians shuffle upstairs. And then we started wondering: are these women prostitutes?

While they probably weren’t charging by the hour, they definitely weren’t working pro bono.

We needed a break from the busboys in tuxes (who, by the way, were all black), so we headed out to forest of Christmas trees lining the lobby. Our momentary nostalgia for New England holiday traditions was quickly shattered by the plastic placards next to each tree.

Each one had a picture of the tree’s decorator (who coincidently owned some over-priced boutique in Bethesda) hugging a young child. Underneath the picture, there was a brief blurb promoting the store and then a longer section with stats on the child’s horrible illness. This included details like how the illness was progressing. We’re not really sure that little Tommy would want all the guests at the Four Seasons to know that he only has five months to live, but someone apparently decided that this was relevant information.

This was when we knew it was time to pay our bill and leave. And when the check came, we finally realized why those women were blowing grandpas for kick-backs. They were probably just trying to pay their tabs.