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Tales from the inauguration: A first-person perspective
It's 3 a.m. Your children are safe and asleep if arriving early at the Metro station is equated with "safe" and passing out in the back seat of the car is considered "asleep."
But the phone on your dresser rings. You answer it.
"Hey, mom?" asks a familiar voice. "My car broke down in Vienna. Can you come get me?"
Ah, the glory of Inauguration Day. Yes, both words should be capitalized. No school for young people, no work for older ones. Except for That One. He definitely had to work.
Braddock Road looked more vacant than Asbury Park. You could literally drive across Fairfax County the morning of Jan. 20 and be more concerned about making the lights than running into a traffic jam.
Inside the District of Columbia, the roads were also barren and ghost-like. Of course, I am referring to three-fourths of the D.C. streets. I base this assumption completely on the fact that for those of us walking around the southwest side of the mall, we could not see the rest of the city even if we wanted to walk wherever our frigid feet would take us. So, as far as I know, there was absolutely nothing going on anywhere else in Washington, D.C.
Being sequestered in a part of the city that makes you think, "Oh, yeah, there is technically a southwest part of the city," with 2.5 million of your closest friends oddly enough provides problems. Blue became the new grey as the Berlin Wall of port-o-potties blocked access to Constitution Avenue.
Little things like toilet paper were at a premium. Perhaps it was because people like me went into the Don Johns hoping to find substitute tissues. Coldness does that. However, the TP holder instead acted more like a mirage. It held nothing. And the sight of evaporating excrement did not exactly encourage me to go searching porto-to-porto. Rather, the C section of the $2 Washington Post would have to suffice.
This was going to be a long morning.
Along with my former college roommate Neil and his editor Donald, both of whom made the trek down from northern Pennsylvania, I marched around the "didn't there used to be grass here" section of the mall near the Porto Wall. The goal: make it as close to the Capitol as possible so the 1-inch-tall guy behind the podium looked like he had something really important to say.
Eventually, we worked our way into the middle of the crowd as the second mirage of the day played with our minds. There, in the center, appeared to be an open space with a 20-foot diameter. Could it be... standing room? We trudged and excused our way forward.
Alas, the frozen desert of D.C. provided just another trick on the eyes: spectators were huddled up together on the ground for warmth and possibly whiskey. But mostly warmth.
So we took our spots along the perimeter of the Sleepy Circle. So far, we had done everything right: we woke up half an hour late, left and hour and a half later than planned, and Neil and I even had a good ol' glass of Sambuca at my relatives' house in Arlington before catching a free bus from Shirlington over the 14th Street bridge.
But it was still more than 3 hours to go before 43 relinquished power to 44. And we were fresh out of Sambuca. In-between uses as a replacement tissue, the Washington Post provided ways to pass the time and think about things like how our extremities were not yet rotting off due to the Nordic-like chill.
Video and audio, though not necessarily in that order, from the pre-inaugural concert streamed from the mega-sized screens mounted at the top of trucks. After all, what use would a day in D.C. provide without being able to watch the video of Garth Brooks singing out-of-sync with the sound coming out of the speakers? We had to have it.
When dignitaries and members of Congress - I distinguish between the two as Jay-Z, Diddy and Beyonce clearly had better seats than rank-and-file members of the House of Representatives - came up on the big screen, the chattering masses would either comment about someone famous or wait for someone more eye-catching to come up than, say, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-You-Probably-Don't-Care-Mont).
What the television broadcasts did not show quite so much of was the non-cheering reactions when someone like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I/D-Droopy Dog) walked across the stage. "Traitor!" many yelled between hisses and boos. Even Sen. John McCain (R-Early Bird Special), the man Lieberman endorsed over eventual-Pres. Barack Hussein Obama (D-Get Used To It), did not receive such a hostile reaction.
Only The Daily Show with Jon Stewart captured what truly happened on the ground that day: the sound of Darth Vader's Imperial March to the entrance of outgoing veep Dick Cheney. But that was mere coincidence; The Daily Show used the actual music. Among the 2.5 million on the mall, a chorus-like chant rang to the tune of the Star Wars classic as Cheney's mug appeared on screen.
By the time then-Pres. George Bush appeared himself, boos were not sufficient. "Does anybody have a shoe?" asked a man who joked about greeting 43 in a manner similar to that of an Iraqi journalist who just really liked the method of attack used by the fat Asian guy from Austin Powers.
Lieberman could have only hoped to have been that reviled.
The coldness from the air and balding scalp of Lieberman thawed when Aretha Franklin, complete with church-like hat and bow, belted out My Country, Tis of Thee to an adorning crowd. As if that wasn't enough, Yo-Yo Ma's cello melted away whatever feelings we in the audience had left. Or perhaps that was just our senses going numb. But everyone could agree: what a sight it was, seeing Yo-Yo Ma after standing for hours upon hours in the cold waiting for someone that wasn't him. Awesome.
Whether this was before or after Yo-Yo (we're on a first-name basis), I can't remember (it was before, I read on Google), but when That Second One took to the podium in front of That Old(est) Guy From The Supreme Court, the crowd gave a rousing response to newly-minted Joe the Vice President.
Naturally, that was only a sliver of the response for Obama, who could not have had anything possibly go wrong with speech that day. Except for Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts tripping him up on the actual oath of office by bungling the words he decided to recite sans-cue cards. Is it any wonder Obama voted against confirming Roberts to the bench? He must have seen that coming years ago.
As for the speech... yeah, yeah, that was nice and all, but I really had to pee! The cattle call-style exit did not help much as the masses could not figure out where to exit after Obama's speech and the Johns were likely full. Time was precious; with some guy rhyming "yella" and "mella" in the background, we marched in the pursuit of not being there anymore.
Thousands of us forged an exit over what used to be a garden-like area near 14th Street SW and completed the transformation from cows to attack-zombies as we marched, this time with space, across the bridge and back into Virginia.
In my group's case, we were trying to make it back to the Pentagon for another free bus ride. But given that the adopted children of Chicago were just installed as President and First Lady, it was all but suitable that the wind whipped wildly enough to create a breeze back at Comisky Park.
Red-eared and delighted to have moved beyond our witnessing of history, our miles-long get-out-of-town walk ended on an overcrowded bus to Shirlington. Our lives had changed forever, and, this time, it was not due to Sambuca alone.
We had a new president. Our nation began a new day.
And I will always have an encrusted C section of the Washington Post to cherish from my own moment in history.
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