At nine o'clock on a bright May morning, near the start of his first real campaign swing, the candidate was sitting in the shabby ground-floor restaurant of the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Houston, wondering what to have for breakfast.
Her new abode is a shabby ground-floor conversion, where a locked door in the bedroom leads to the other half of the house, and an understairs cupboard is filled with the evocative cast-offs of former inhabitants: "a cardboard box filled with dusty baby blankets; a cool box; a camping stove … a case of LPs with nothing to play them on".
The embassy, whose shabby grounds are badly in need of fresh paint, green grass and elbow grease, has been shut since 1989, when the United States padlocked the doors, citing safety concerns.
Meanwhile injured men, most in their early 20s, writhed in agony on shabby mattresses on the ground.
"The president is on shaky ground with the hard right and is using this questionably legal and politically shabby technique to bolster himself," Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Judiciary Committee member, said on Friday.
Amid the honeycomb of offices and hidden rooms on the ground floor of a shabby brick building facing the Hudson River, activists and agitators unite for classes like "Antonio Gramsci: Revolutionary Strategy and the Historic Bloc" and talks like "Envisioning a Post-Capitalist Future".
Its biggest secondary school is shabby, and its pupils often have lessons sitting on the ground outside because there is not enough room inside the classrooms.
We will leave it to the Republicans to work out the riddle of the gap between their professed honor for American heroes and their shabby disdain for those who risked their health and lives at ground zero.
Be warned, though, that booking is nigh on essential, and that first-timers will assume they have come to the wrong place, so shabby is the entrance up to the second floor restaurant from ground level.
John Lee Beatty's set -- from Margie's shabby kitchen to Mike's beautifully apportioned living room -- grounds the production.
