In December 2008 Douglas Prasher took a week off from his job driving a courtesy van at the Penney Toyota car dealership in Huntsville, Alabama, to attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. It was the first vacation he and his wife, Gina, had taken in years. On the day of the awards, he donned a rented copy of the penguin suit that all male Nobel attendees are required to wear, along with a pair of leather shoes that a Huntsville store had let him borrow.
At the Nobel banquet, sitting beneath glittering chandeliers suspended from a seven-story ceiling, Prasher got his first sip of a dessert wine that he had dreamed of tasting for 30 years. When the waitress was done pouring it into his glass, he asked if she could leave the bottle at the table. She couldn’t, she told him, because the staff planned to finish it ...
