Cuisine Great, Privacy Lacking At Storm Shelter

Deeply moved by the Clarks’ current life without current, my editor, Joe, offered to treat us to an evening of hot food and entertainment.

A true humanitarian, that man.

So my wife, Sherry, and I negotiated the snowy Spokane streets, cursing those smug homeowners who not only have power to burn but have put up twinkling Christmas lights.

Talk about rubbing our noses in our darkness. These light-hearted jerks should be flogged for felonious flaunting.

Following Joe’s directions, we arrived at the Red Cross shelter in the downtown Convention Center just in time to catch “Friends” on an actual big-screen television.

A shelter. Well, that wasn’t quite what we expected.

But it was better than the “must-hear” TV we get through my daughter Emily’s battery-powered boom box. We stayed put and, during commercial breaks, shared our misery with other ice storm survivors.

Survivors like Shad and Teddy and Jaymie and…

Wait a second. Something’s mighty fishy about this hippie-garbed gang of six boys and two girls who sat cross-legged on the floor a few feet inside the shelter entrance.

They didn’t look like ice storm victims to me.

“We’re Phish Kids,” said Chris, a 19-year-old from Fort Wayne, Ind.

Phreaking Phreeloaders is a more apt description.

The youthful equivalent of Grateful “Deadheads,” these pikers mooch across America following the rock ‘n’ roll band Phish, which played the Spokane Arena Friday night.

“We’re pretty resourceful,” said Connecticut resident Shad, 20, who has attended 26 Phish concerts.

“I can usually find a shelter within 20 minutes of pulling into a town. But this is the first shelter we’ve found that has cheesecake.”

They do put on the ol’ feedbag here. Area restaurants and stores donated hot turkey dinners, pizza, croissants and chocolate cake.

Note to the food crew: One of the Phish fans was slightly put off that there wasn’t more vegetarian cuisine for him to stuff down his greedy yap.

Hey, tofu for brains, this ain’t the Hilton. This is an emergency shelter for those frozen out of their homes after last Tuesday’s ice storm.

It’s no fun fleeing to a shelter. There’s little privacy and long lines of Army cots.

Someone mentioned there might be a shower, not that Phish Kids care about that. A herd of elk might smell worse, but these nomads probably haven’t brushed up against a bar of soap since the first Ice Age.

Enough carping about Phish.

There were plenty of legitimately displaced people.

Greg Brown, 33, said he came here after the temperature at his house dropped to 25. “It was either that or turn into an ice cube.”

At a nearby table, oblivious to the steady roar of the crowded room, Reyne Finley played “Life” with her daughter, Meghan, and friend, Amanda Morris.

The two 14-year-olds assured me there were absolutely no ice storms in the classic Milton Bradley game. The closest you can come is landing on a square that reads:

“Yacht hit iceberg. Sell ice cubes. Collect $10,000.”

“I miss my home,” said Reyne wistfully.

Everyone has a hard-luck story.

“I’m having to wash my hair in the sink at the station,” confessed KHQ news anchor Debra Wilde, who was at the shelter broadcasting a live compassion-cast.

Being an influential powerless member of the media, I tried to muscle WWP executive Rob Fukai into answering the following all-important question: “When do I get my bloody lights on?”

Unfortunately, we kept getting interrupted by a befuddled elderly woman who repeatedly asked Fukai if he was Washington’s new governor.

“You look exactly like him,” she said.

“No,” Fukai countered for the third time, “he’s, um, much thinner.”

, DataTimes