What a day to choose for a hash - one day before tax filing/payment day. By 7pm only three hounds had arrived, your scribe, Dave Croft from the depths of Long Island and John O'Connor. He was challenged by the Resident policeman - "You can't sit on the steps: Move on!" John continued his wardrobe functions standing on the steps, but a little further away.

We were then approached by a distraught young lady seeking advice on payment of State taxes. Scribe and Crofty responded, to her dismay. "Oh, you're not American. " John took over, to her relief but not elucidation. Crofty, with eighteen years of residence behind him, gave all the technical details. Apparently she had filed Federal return by telephone and forgotten to record what she said. One unhappy client of GPO Tax Consultants Inc went her way with the advice "pay something, anything to show willing" She only asked us because we looked mature. (Or was it elderly?).

By now there was a partly amused but mostly inattentive audience of some 25 hashers, but at 7.15 no hares. They strolled in from the north, but insisted on staying on the sidewalk. Had they had an earlier step encounter? We were sent off westward around the north side of the post office, with the warning - "If you come to a locked gate, use your head."

The pack was big enough to solve the checks quickly and a well set trail took us north by west and back east at a gallop to Columbus Circle. This took a little longer to solve, with only a, flirtation in the Park before exiting at 7th Avenue southward.

Here the fun began. The hares had used every hotel lobby, alleyway and parking garage drive through, many with locked gates. It kept the pack together, with frustrated, cussing front runners casting futilely around. Presented with the fifth locked gate there was indeed the temptation to "use the head", resisted because of lack of adequate horns for the bulldozing.

And so passed the Post Office again, with grinning hares still not standing on the steps. On in to the Garden Tavern. Despite the large turn out, no-one admitted virginity and downdowns were kept mercifully short. Comments on the run were what would be expected for one laid by a Diva. There was one notable imminent loss of virginity, this being the last prenuptial run of Bo Petkovich. He promised to return in two weeks to tell us all about it.