In the TV show "Arrested Development" -- may it rest in peace -- my favorite character, a hapless magician, often glides into scenes on a punch line.
The joke is his mode of transportation: the Segway, the self-balancing people mover.
So when I heard about the Segway tour of Pittsburgh, I had to jump on it, so to speak.
The tour's Web site, segwayinparadise.com, proclaims, "Your search for a good time has ended here!" That's not really a promise, but I bit, signing up for a $50 tour that gets you two hours of ride time and a half-hour of training, which I would surely need.
I met up with Earlene, the co-founder of Segway in Paradise, in Point State Park, where the other riders already were doing loopy figure eights around the pavement. My steed was waiting for me.
In person, a Segway looks kind of like a cross between a push lawnmower and Johnny-Five. The first trick in riding it, it seems, is to turn the thing on, a lesson President Bush learned the hard way in 2003. The gyroscopes can't keep the scooter upright if it's not powered up, and if you fall off it, you can bet a photographer is capturing that special moment.
After getting over my initial distrust of the thing in about 15 minutes, I was rolling around the sidewalk, accelerating and reversing by shifting my weight with my feet.
We coasted at a breezy 5 mph from the North Shore to the South Side like little ducks in a row. Little ducks with $5,000 scooters.
Earlene stopped a few times along the way to give fascinated pedestrians brochures. "I just learned how to ride this a half hour ago!" I told them, rolling back and forth on the sidewalk, barely avoiding a collision with a newspaper box.
The Segways endowed on us the popularity. "I gotta get one of those!" a woman waiting for the bus cried out, as an elderly man with a walker watched us in a rather jealous fashion.
Riding through Downtown was a strange combination of feeling above the city and absurdly privileged ... and of being utterly humiliated, like being seen at the mall with your mother.
I blame the latter on the fact we had to wear safari hats with a chin strap. When I asked at the end of the tour if they were for safety or for decoration, Earlene replied, "Oh, a little of both."
That's one way to stay grounded, I suppose. And I was glad to get back on my two feet.
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