DATE: Sunday, June 22, 1997                 TAG: 9706190141

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

YO! MAYOR MEYERA! OUR OWENFEST INVITE GOT LOST IN THE MAIL

I haven't been this mad at Meyera Oberndorf since her government chased all the thong-bottom bathing suits off the Boardwalk.

Mayor Meyera, it seems, declared a holiday last week and didn't tell anybody until it was too late for me to take the day off.

Monday, by mayoral proclamation, was ``Owen B. Pickett Day'' in Virginia Beach. It's a new holiday that the good mayor has wedged into the calendar between Jimmy Buffett Day and Independence Day. This calls for a three-day weekend, but Meyera's office didn't fax us the news until nearly 2 o'clock Monday afternoon.

Owen B. Pickett Day. Twenty-four hours of raucous, heavy-metal celebration in honor of the congressman from the State of Gray.

Owen B. Pickett Day. And I missed it. With a little warning I could have celebrated appropriately. Maybe rearranged my sock drawer, or scurried down to Morrison's for a double-scoop of mashed potatoes with a mineral-water chaser.

Truth is, I like Owen Pickett. He has ably represented most of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in Congress for 11 years now. In that time he has never once fallen into the Tidal Basin with a bimbo. He has never been captured on videotape stuffing wads of $100 bills into his suit coat. He has never had to explain why he takes up pages 186-192 of a kiss'n'tell Beltway expose.

It is quite possible that Mike Wallace doesn't know who Owen Pickett is. You'll never see him sitting next to Cokie Roberts on Sunday morning, doing the network shuck'n'grin about the latest Washington in-joke.

Part of that can be explained by environmental factors. Pickett is educated as both a lawyer and an accountant. That means he's one of the few in Congress who can understand what he's voting on and be appalled at the pricetag, all at the same time.

Trouble is, anybody who's trained as both an accountant and a lawyer is apt to speak in an obscure dialect known as ``Flannel.'' I once interviewed Owen Pickett for a solid hour. When I played back the tape I had a perfectly logical answer for every question I'd asked - even the mean ones - but not a single line that said, ``Hey, great quote!'' You'd have sworn it was a tape of a guy reading from an economics textbook, but I was there, and this stuff was coming right off the top of his head.

His aides swear up and down that Owen - his nickname is ``Owen'' - has a terrific sense of humor. (I think I'm about to find out.) He takes a lot of ribbing about having a charisma count that's lower than the inflation rate. It hasn't seemed to matter. He's so strong locally that the GOP has pretty much given up trying to knock him off.

And as for the value of charisma, well, if you watch the news shows you probably believe that all of Congress is populated by media-savvy haircuts who think it's perfectly reasonable to keep flood victims in the Upper Midwest living in mud huts while the legislature wrestles over the life-or-death question of the proper statistical sampling methods to be used in the next U.S. Census. The charisma boys seem to think their primary function is to provide grist for Jay Leno's writers.

So if Owen seems a little too beige, well, we ought not quibble. The congressman from the last district I lived in is one of those guys you see late at night on C-SPAN, his fright-wig hair askew and his $40 one-size-fits-all polyester suit riding up at the crotch, his arms waving in hysteria as he lectures a dead-empty House chamber on the evils of paragraph 3 of an amendment to HB97016 as it relates to import quotas on Chilean bat-guano.

In these moments I mutter, ``Thank God for Owen B. Pickett.'' And thanks as well that the people around here believe there are better ways to support a constitutional democracy than to send Sonny Bono to Congress.

So next time Mayor Meyera's planning a boogie-down for Owen, we're hoping we get a better heads-up. I'll want time to get my brown suit out of the cleaner's and put some milk on ice. Party hearty, congressman. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

CHARLIE MEADS/The Virginian-Pilot

Pickett

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