Dec 24, 2021 3 min read

For a minute there, I was thinking it was that creepy Drosselmeyer’s fault.

My friend Annette and I had just left a Pittsburgh Ballet Theater performance of “The Nutcracker” and were back in the downtown parking garage, wandering around. This annual Christmas tradition of ours was turning into a holiday nightmare. Long after the Sugarplum Fairy had taken her last bow, we found ourselves lost in concrete space.

In the parking garage lobby, we had squeezed onto an elevator and pushed the button for Level One. I’d made a mental note of that location when we parked. Pushed the button again, but the elevator didn’t move.

“I think the lobby is Level One,” the woman next to me said, through her mask.

I pushed the button for Level Two, thinking that Annette and I could get off there and walk down one -which we did, clinging to a skinny ledge to avoid the cars.

“I see the car,” I said, pointing to a red SUV parked next to a black truck. I remembered Annette had made a wide swing around a truck when we first pulled in.

“Red car next to a black truck,” I shouted, running in that direction.

“Not my car,” she yelled after me. We scoured Level One, I taking long strides in the cold, and petite Annette scurrying to keep up. Her car was not there.

Were we in the wrong garage?

We took the elevator back down to the lobby, climbed the stairs up one level, and started over.

“Red SUV,” I cried, my voice echoing through the cavern.

“Not my car,” Annette said, again.

We would repeat that call-and-response at least three more times over the next 40 minutes, with me spotting and rejoicing over red cars and Annette, with increasing irritation, disagreeing. Who knew there were so many red SUVs?

“The pilot for ‘Seinfeld’ was this exact thing,” I said.

The garage Jerry and his crew were lost in was horizontal. Annette and I were lost in vertical space, which for your information, is worse.

After a half hour of lurking on ramps, we headed back to the lobby for help. The nice young security guard followed us, asking questions that Annette and I were not prepared to answer: What did the overhead signs look like? Which ticket machine did we pass through?

“Red SUV. Level One,” was all we could say.

He asked for the keys and hit the panic button, so the car would announce itself. Crickets. I was beginning to fear someone had stolen the car. Or moved it. The evil eye-patched Drosselmeyer character would be the type, I thought, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” still playing in my head.

Now all three of us were roaming.

I decided it might be time to hire an Uber to drive us around the garage on a recovery mission. Just then the security guard stopped, pointed over the side of a ramp and said, “Red SUV.”

This time he was right.

I felt the need to hug him, but tipped him $5 instead.

As we drove out, Annette inserted our paid ticket at the machine, but the gate wouldn’t lift. Those tickets have a time limit. In order to exit this nightmare, we had to insert a credit card to pay again.

I thought about parking and returning to the lobby to ask for a refund, but the thought passed. We pulled out and headed home, sugarplum fairies dancing in our heads.