Sisters Rise to Heights of Famous Acting Duo

When traveling outside my mostly one-story rural county, I frequently run into the same problem over and over - elevators.

What people who live in metropolitan areas don't realize is that people from "the sticks" (and we know who we are) are what you might call "elevator challenged." We don't operate elevators with the finesse and sophistication as city folk, who depend on elevators to transport them through their daily routines. We, instead, consider elevators curious contraptions, wrought with dupery, consternation, and sometimes, laughing fits.

Over the past few weeks, my older sister, Candi, and I managed to accomplish the near-impossible - transporting an ill mother hundreds of miles to numerous doctor appointments at the 16-building Mayo Clinic complex in Rochester, Minnesota; negotiating our way through tunnel walkways, skyways and hospital shuttles; and even saving my mother from being run over by a bus while being wheeled from a patient van just hours after surgery. But it turns out our Waterloo was attempting to travel down one floor on a hotel elevator to retrieve our luggage from our car. Long story short, we vacated what I now fondly refer to as the "Bates Motel" after the stench of mold in our room got the better of us, and moved to the Rochester Holiday Inn Express. We made the switch while mom was undergoing her procedure and left our luggage in our car until they could get our room ready for us.

After we got a groggy mom into her bed in our squeaky clean hotel, we grabbed a luggage dolly from the hotel lobby and headed to the garage elevator. There was also a glassed-in stairway next to the elevator that led down one flight to the 2^nd floor of the parking garage where my car was parked virtually outside the door. My sister pushed the call button for the elevator and we wheeled the luggage cart on and rode down to the 2^nd floor. The elevator had a front and a rear door, with the rear door facing the garage. When the elevator stopped, the front door opened, but the rear door, leading to the garage, did not. I hit the "open door" button but nothing happened.

For some unexplained reason my sister pressed the 3rd floor button, and we rode the elevator back up to the 3^rd floor. The doors on both sides opened. So she pushed "2" again, we rode down to the 2^nd floor and, once again, the rear elevator door didn't open. By now, if you are smarter than a fifth grader who lives in the city, you may have deduced that the elevator quite possibly had a separate set of buttons for operating the rear door, and that if we had simply pressed "2 R" the rear door would have opened. And you would have been right. But, hard as this is to believe, we never noticed the long row of extra buttons until after the following scene played out: Disconcerted, we rode the elevator back up to the 3^rd floor and removed the luggage dolly from the elevator. I stayed at the top of the staircase, alternately looking at my car and my sister who walked down the stairs and approached the closed elevator door. Suddenly the elevator doors swung open..

Me, shouting down the stairway to Candi: How did you do that?

Candi, shouting up: I just pressed the call button.

Me: Oh. O.K., you get in, go up to the third floor and I'll come down there and call the elevator. Then when it comes down, the doors should open again!

Candi got back in the elevator, rode back up to the 3^rd floor and wheeled the luggage stand back into the elevator. I pressed the down button and, as planned, the elevator came down and the doors opened. We rolled the luggage stand out of he elevator and over to the car, loaded it up and pushed it back to the elevator. Candi heaved the load of luggage into the elevator as far as she could and I attempted to enter behind her but my mother's walker that I was pushing would not fit in when I tried to get on. As I stood outside the elevator I tried to figure out how to fold it up, the elevator doors closed. I quickly pushed the call button and they opened again, revealing my sister who stood behind the loaded luggage rack with a look of confusion on her face.

"How do you fold this thing?" I asked.

Suddenly the doors closed again.

I pushed the call button again, the doors opened. By this time Candi was chuckling and shaking her head.

"I can't get this darn thing folded," I said, barely getting the words out as the doors, once again, closed

I pushed the call button again, the doors opened. By this time my sister was hunched over, laughing so hard she couldn't talk. Suddenly I burst out laughing, still fumbling with the walker.

"Why don't I just take the..."

Boom, the doors closed again.

I pressed the call button. Doors opened. By now my sister was laughing so hard she couldn't even breathe. But the good news was, I managed to fold the walker and I quickly scooted onto the elevator.

"Oh look," I said when I went to press the button for the 3^rd floor. "They have separate buttons for the rear door!"

Laurel and Hardy would have killed to ride an elevator with us.