to washington

some day, i’ll get the hang of this blogging thing. which is to say: making timely posts. in my defense, i did write a couple of lovely posts in lilting prose for my employer while in washington for president obama’s inauguration: one about service and MLK day, and the other about barack’s big day. here then, are a few things not recounted for the pta set:

• there’s no use denying it: president obama kinda isa celebrity. while i was in the national portrait gallery/smithsonian american art museum, there was a line of people 50 deep waiting to have their picture taken… with a picture of barack obama (side note: there are currently some truly remarkable portraits being exhibited from katy grannan, jocelyn lee, ryan mcginley, steve pyke, martin schoeller, and alec soth).
• tim tuten, a personal hero of mine in his (ahem) “vocal” support of chicago musicians and artists, helped put together a stellar line-up for the big shoulders ball at DC’s black cat club.
• somebody way closer than me on inauguration day (with a camera way better than mine) took a f*cking brilliant shot in which, even with the super-zoom, you still cannot see where i was standing on jan. 20, 1.5 miles away from the capitol. that small white spire in the background at the very right edge of the photo? yeah, i was behind that.
• as much as i didn’t miss sitting in traffic, i had hoped to see a bunch of people roadtripping out to DC (or coming back the day after) on america’s highways. but, in fact, you could walk around my ‘hood on any given day and find in one block more cars with obama bumper stickers than i saw during all the hours spent on the roads of IN, OH, PA, and MD. there were an incredible amount of soldiers at ohio and pennsylvannia rest stops, though.
• the frownie brownie collectively blew the minds of everyone on our fantastical journey.
• sleeping off a good drunken night for three hours in a car in sub-freezing temps only to jump on a metro train which took 2 hours to go six stops only to walk many many blocks (first in the wrong direction, then backtracking) while wearing yesterday’s clothes from the club only to stand with 2 million other people and witness an inaugural address from our country’s first black president via a jumbotron and p.a. system? priceless.