TRAVELING IN STYLE : SECRETS OF A CAPITOL HILL NATIVE : Welcome to the Real Washington, D.C., Where the Waitresses Are Grumpy, Teddy Kennedy Behaves and Little Girls Serve Lemonade to Protest Marchers

“There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone has been away from home too long.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 11, 1955

IF YOU’RE NOT FROM WASHINGTON--IFyou’re a tourist or a newcomer--you might well be forgiven for thinking that the city’s only permanent residents are carved out of marble or cast in bronze. Everybody else, it might seem, comes from some other city, perches here briefly and then scurries away the instant the Administration changes--abandoning the temporarily fashionable businesses that served them and packing up their houses overnight.

This, in fact, is true--at least partly. For instance, Sans Souci (“Without a Care”)--the chic and pricey restaurant favored by the Richard M. Nixon White House--fell out of fashion under Jimmy Carter, went out of business during Ronald Reagan’s first term and literally became a McDonald’s while George Bush was in the Oval Office (a change that no doubt appeals to our current President). And in the November that follows each presidential change of power, the local real estate market heats up, as appointees of the outgoing Administration rush to unload houses bought with resale in mind and their incoming replacements are caught up in a collective panic over the price of each square foot inside the Beltway.

But this applies only to the powerful and their minions. And it is important to remember that, in Washington, despite the popular view of this great capital, the powerful are in the minority.

I GREW UP ON CAPITOL HILL IN A ROW HOUSEon Constitution Avenue--the house in which my father was born. (I now live a few miles away, on the Washington side of Chevy Chase, and my parents have moved seven doors down Constitution Avenue--”our flight to the suburbs,” my mom called it.) The Supreme Court is three blocks from the house. The closest Senate office building was four blocks away when I was a kid, but since the Hart Building was finished in 1982, the walk has shrunk to two-and-a-half. From my parents’ roof you can see the light in the Capitol dome that is always on when the Senate is in session; before it was taken down for restoration, you could also see the Statue of Freedom that stands atop the dome. As children, we called her Boomio, for reasons I can’t possibly recall.

In Washington, we tend to log local history in terms of two things--not presidents or party politics, but marches and scandals.

My father remembers the Ku Klux Klan marching down Constitution Avenue (then called B Street) in 1925. They wore pointy hats and were wrapped in white robes, except for their leaders, who wore purple. He was 2 years old.

When I was 7, the Freedom Marchers walked the same sidewalks on their way to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. My brother and sister and I stood at the edge of our yard, passing out cookies and lemonade.

This spring my daughters, Emily, 8, and Marguerite, 5, saw their first full-scale demonstration--the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.

In between my generation and theirs were marches that, looked at collectively, reflect how the country has changed. In the anti-war ‘60s, there were candlelit walks at night led by Another Mother for Peace--and, later, angry protest parades during which tear gas canisters were launched at marchers and, on at least one occasion, National Guardsmen took up positions on the same roofs across which Clint Eastwood chased John Malkovich in the recent hit movie “In the Line of Fire.”

Abortion rights advocates and abortion protesters, both sure in their beliefs, have been charging the Capitol, off and on, for more than two decades. The Desert Storm victory parade came down the same streets, hailed by a joyous noise. For an instant Constitution Avenue was engulfed in twilight--the shadow of a Stealth fighter plane passing overhead.

In recent years, marches have become largely made-for-TV events, complete with flatbed trucks carrying photographers, inching ahead of the pack, stopping every 30 or 40 feet so reporters can gather quotes. Even when they lack spontaneity, though, marches are an interesting way to track history.

SCANDALS TEND TO BE SPONTANEOUS BY definition, and they can happen in any corner of the city. When we Washingtonians have visitors who want an “inside” view of the city, we like to take them on a little scandal tour: We drive them past the Watergate, a gray, kidney-shaped luxury hotel, apartment and business complex that is now best known as the place where the Nixon presidency began to unravel. We stand on the banks of the Tidal Basin where, in 1974, a drunken Wilbur Mills (then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee) stood as his companion, a stripper named Fanne Foxe, threw herself into the drink. (She was pulled out by the same police officers who, moments earlier, had stopped the couple for speeding.) We snack at the Stouffer Mayflower Hotel, where J. Edgar Hoover often lunched with his friend Clyde Tolson. We drop by the Capitol steps, where, claimed Rita Jenrette, she and her then-husband, former Rep. John Jenrette (D-S.C.), had sex while his colleagues were inside conducting the nation’s business.

Later, we head a few blocks northwest to La Colline, a good French restaurant where Teddy Kennedy and his good friend, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, apparently in a festive mood, reportedly removed the management’s framed photos of themselves from the wall, threw them to the floor and danced on each other’s faces. From there, it’s only a few blocks to La Brasserie, another French place, in one of whose private dining rooms Kennedy reportedly engaged in a lunchtime tryst with a young female lobbyist, thereby shocking a waitress who inadvertently interrupted the amorous pair. To the disappointment of many amateur tour guides, no bad or even frisky behavior has been reported of the senator since his recent marriage.

On Sixth Street, S.E., we pass the brick townhouse where Gary Hart dashed his presidential hopes after being spotted with a blond pharmaceutical saleswoman named Donna, who wasn’t his wife. We swing by the Vista Hotel, where the city’s former mayor, Marion Barry, was videotaped smoking crack in the company of friend-turned-FBI informant Rasheeda Moore. If our visitors are history buffs, we swing by K Street, to the property on which once stood the “Little Green House,” where President Warren G. Harding went to drink whiskey, which was illegal, and to be entertained by women, who were illegal too. Scandal is nothing new in Washington.

AS A RULE, UNLESS THEY work for the White House, Washingtonians don’t go gaga over a President. The exception was John F. Kennedy. Washington became as pro-Kennedy as Massachusetts. It was, when I was small, a grand compliment for a young girl to be told that she looked like Caroline. Even my sensible mother once admonished her daughters, “Jackie Kennedy would never flap her elbows at the dinner table.”

After Camelot, she never again invoked the name of a First Lady. I don’t think we cared what Pat Nixon looked like when she ate.

But dinners are important in Washington. Almost everyone is interested in where, and sometimes what, First Families eat. Nancy Reagan liked the very good and very expensive L’Auberge Chez Francois and the Jockey Club at the Ritz Carlton. The Bushes liked the Peking Gourmet across the Potomac in not particularly fashionable Falls Church, Va.--and President Bush was once heard to order quail at the Rio Grande in Bethesda, Md. The Clintons, apparently eclectic eaters, have dined at Nora’s (an intimate restaurant exhaustively described in Sally Quinn’s novel “Happy Endings”) and the Red Sage (a newer hot spot with an exotic Western-themed menu).

Duke Zeibert’s seems to be popular with all kinds of people. CNN’s Larry King eats at Duke’s almost every day. Wonder Woman Lynda Carter and her lawyer husband Robert Altman are Duke’s regulars. The Clintons recently dropped by for dinner with Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

Natives eat at places like Red Sage, Jean-Louis and the fashionable Tuscan-style Italian place I Ricchi when they have something to celebrate and money to spend. For regular Sunday-morning hanging-around, though, they tend to go to places like Sherrill’s Bakery, where the waitresses are so grumpy they border on mean, but they won’t chase you away when you want to read the paper. Another block down Pennsylvania Avenue is the Tune Inn, where the jukebox plays “Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer” and, until the machine was vandalized recently, French ticklers were sold in the ladies room. The Tune, as it’s known, has its own grumpy waitresses and, like Sherrill’s, is a short walk from the House of Representatives. Thus it gets rediscovered with each new Administration by the younger, less pecunious Hill staffers, is written about in another national magazine and visited by a movie star or two. Along the way, it grows progressively more crowded, which aggravates the regulars.

IT IS TRUE THAT WASHINGTON residents sometimes get to see extraordinary people doing ordinary things. Washington is a city of only 68.25 square miles, with a population of 606,900, so it’s logical that sooner or later the right time/right place factor will kick in and someone reasonably famous will come into your line of vision. On a recent Sunday morning, for instance, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor were seen shopping in our Chevy Chase Safeway. This would have made an impression on a real Washingtonian only if they had been sharing a cart.