Some of you may have already heard about what NPR, facebook groups and Youtube are calling the “Purple Tunnel of Doom” or “Purplegate”. Some-odd thousand people like myself have traveled from around the country with tickets to the inauguration (I have mine through a friend who was crunching data at an undisclosed campaign location in Missouri) only to find ourselves squashed into several square blocks unable to get through the Purple security gate to see the inauguration of our 44th president.
But let me rewind a few days, because this is really part of a big weekend and beyond that a bigger socio-eco-political movement that has been sweeping America off it’s barka-loungers…
Our journey began on Saturday when Kate, David, baby Alice, Johnny, Debbie and I drove out of town in a Budget mini-van, destination Camelback, PA. We arrived in time to check in to our local ski lodge-cum-hotel, before heading to a Japanese restaurant called Shiro, a huge hibachi and sushi house with like 50 tables, a dance floor, a magician/animal balloon specialist and more. Kind of crazy in the middle of Pennsylvania, but it was packed and quite good. If you build it, right? And if there is one thing that I can eat a lot of, it’s sushi. Now, I’m not in a Claudia French league, but if she (at her Italian 5’5” and 105 pounds) represents the NBA slam-dunk championship of sushi eating ability, then I’m probably hitting final-four levels. Allez-hop!
After stuffing our faces we returned to the hotel where we slipped under our cozy comforters for a cup of hot cocoa before bed. The
snow had already begun to fall and we woke up Sunday morning to 4" inches of “freshie” and more gently falling from the sky. After we gorged ourselves on a breakfast of scrapple (Pennsylvania's answer to Spam) and pancakes and bacon and waffles the like (Johnny even had a piece of homemade pumpkin pie), we hit the hill. I mean this, the hill, literally and metaphorically. Camelback has something like 400' of verticalish feet of skiing. There are double-black diamonds, but they’re something like blue squares for us west coast ski snobs, so I have to think of it as a ski hill and not a ski mountain.
It was Debbie's first time, which was fun, but I quickly realized how difficult, and probably pointless, it is to explain a complicated physical choreography like getting two big sticks strapped to your feet to run smoothly over snow and ice (and the occasional ski pole or thigh). I should have used the inner game of skiing approach, I guess. In the end, everybody had a good time and Debbie looked incredibly cute in her ski gear.
There was also a kind of a funny moment when we were renting our equipment, if you consider my clenched cheeks (top and bottom) combined with a sort of wheezing sound and slow head bobbing as a sign that I was finding it funny. Debbie didn’t have her purse with her so both sets of rentals went on my credit card and ID. The whole thing was computerized, with a special scanner for the driver’s license and everything, so all you had to do was give your height and weight and it automatically spit out your name, address, rental agreement and even binding settings and sugg
ested ski lengths for the kid behind the next counter. After giving them my information, it was Debbie’s turn. As if telling the girl her weight wasn’t bad enough, her information immediately popped up on the screen based on my account which the girl showed us and asked us to verify. It read DEBBORA LAPIN along with the address etc. etc. When the rental girl asked if everything was correct, we both went into the wheezing and head bobbing thing which I describe above and which the rental girl took as a yes. Camelback Mountain Resort, PA now pronounces you man and wife!
David, who is responsible for that last line, had a great fall that we wished we had caught on film. We were trying to cut across runs through a closed path and there was one of those orange mesh fences with closed signs that was on the ground across the entry. We figured we would just pop over and be on our merry way, so we pushed off and David was first to cross but he didn't realize or wasn't able to jump his skis, especially the tips, all the way over the fence. When his tips got caught in the fence and quickly decelerated to a stop, David was flung forward into the snow in what skiers like to call a yard sale. It would have surely been an instant YouTube classic (more hits than Jesse Long falling off a camel guaranteed!), if only we had perfected the 24/7 inner-eye recording device that I'm sure will make future generations all stars of their own reality shows. When I stopped laughing and offered to film it, David was not gracious enough to replay the event.
After skiing, we headed off to Hagerstown, Maryland, home of the Hennebergers. David had called ahead and they were preparing a big après-ski fajita feast for our arrival. David warned us not to ask his dad about his days as a swinging disco owner, but told us that he used to be in the hotel industry and his step-mom had a side business with her daughter “Dobbie” as bar-tenders for private parties and the like. Let me say that the Hennebergers lived up to their reputations as hospitality industry professionals. We ate and drank and talked ourselves silly until the wee hours in the morning, only stopping to bathe our bloated bodies in the Jacuzzi.
We got back in our mini-van Monday morning and headed off to the sweet sounds of xylophone U2 lullabies which we often had to play for hours at a time in the hope that it would drive baby Alice to nap before the rest of us to pushed long sharp metal objects deep into our eardrums.
Nevertheless, we arrived in one peace at the Rope’s residence, in the heart of DC, a few blocks from the National Cathedral (everything in DC is the National something), St Albans and The Sidwell Friends School where Kate’s Mom will soon be helping little Malia memorize the names of all the presidents and other such oh-so-sixth grade activities--she’s already 1/44th of the way there without even opening a book, right? After a light lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Kate-n-David took us on a little tour of the capital. Although it was the day before the inauguration and you could sort of sense the excitement hiding behind every faux ionic column, the streets remained fairly crowd and closure free.
Fast forward through dinner, another early night to bed and a veritable monastic morning of Odwalla Superfood (the perfect balance of juice puree, artichoke dust and thistle, with a little prairie grass thrown in for flavor that would get me through the big day without needing a restroom. I mean, hey, it's called super food, what could be better than that?) and you are now in the same gastrointestinal-psychological-spiritual state as I was on Tuesday morning, January 20, 2009, aka O-day.
We left the Rope’s house at about 8 am and jumped on an already crowded DC metro to Judiciary Square. The atmosphere was charged with excitement. Complete strangers were making room for each other on the subway cars, smiling, talking and sharing stories. Some of them even New Yorkers!
After getting out of the metro, Debbie and I parted ways with Kate-n-David and Johnny. Our tickets directing us to where we needed to pass through the Purple security gate which was scheduled to open at 9am.
We walked up E street and turned the corner onto First St. NW to discover that there was nothing between us and the security gate except about four blocks of completely packed human bodies. Well, I thought, the security gate hasn’t opened yet.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…
It’s now about 10:30 am and we have only moved 100 feet, I think to myself that they must be really screening people carefully or maybe they don’t have enough screeners. This is making the TSA look like the Mossad, right? Pretty soon though, rumors start to circulate that the street is barricaded and the security gate a block or so after that isn’t even open. People are saying that it is closed because people have sneaked in over night and they are trying to clear them out. Later the story is that people with other ticket colors have broken through a barrier and gotten into our section.
As time passes and people’s begin losing patience and feeling in their extremities, attrition sets in as people decide to leave and look for a warm room with a television or maybe just another crowded area that at least has a view of a JumboTron. Some come from the front of the crowd reporting that they have been there since 5:00 am. They can’t take it anymore, “abort, abort.” Others explain that they have gotten stuck in the crowd and don’t even have tickets, but are just trying to get to the Mall or to the other side of the street. The stream of people leaving allows us to periodically move forward, giving us the illusion of progress, and then the progress is lost as someone in the crowd passes out or calls for medical attention and the ambulance parked half a block back turns on its lights and tries to plow its way to the rescue. Most of the time it doesn’t make it and the EMTS settle for passing a medical bag across the crowd to a waiting doctor or good Samaritan.
At about 11:15, 15 minutes before the ceremonies are scheduled to begin, the barricade at 1st and C is removed (or shoved aside?) and the crowd surges forward. Finally we think, our patience has been rewarded. We feel sorry for the people who were there before us and have given up, but we understand that they were about 4 hours more cold and hungry than us.
As the crowd moves ahead, we are happy to be making real progress, but it is also scary to think what would happen if, god forbid, we were to fall or faint. As it is, landscaping, flowers beds and even whole sections of shrubbery are being trampled without remorse. A big black woman who is bushwhacking her way in front of us yells for anyone who cares to listen, “I ain’t holdin’ no bushes for nobody, I ain’t holding no more bushes. I tell you I’ve been holding bushes for 8 years and I’ve had it!” It’s a good line.
The crowd has been pretty friendly up till now, with different groups of people joking amongst themselves or trading ironic observations about the lack of organization, the stupidity of crowds, the cold and so on, but people are starting to get frustrated. Most people just want to know what the heck is going on, so we continually ask people pushing their way out of the pack what they have seen, did they have tickets, have they seen the gate?
Once again the crowd is stopped and I have the idea of starting an information tree. I ask the people in front of us to pass the
message along to the people in front of them and so on to the front of the crowd asking them to send information back down about just what the heck is going on. The people in front of us ask the person in front of them to find out what was going and she says over her shoulder, “I can’t see anything.” And that is it. It’s too many instructions for a big crowd. I consider explaining the system again, but realize it probably won’t make it half a block. Another foliage casualty to add to the list; the information tree has just died on the vine in front of our eyes.
As the minutes pass, my bladder and ankles begin to swell and it doesn’t look like we are going to make it in time. People are giving up hope and courtesy and begin shoving rather than sliding their way out bringing with them word that the security gates are still not open. Nobody is being let in. Some people are saying that the CIA hasn’t given the word to start the screening process and that it is just a miscommunication. Others say that people have snuck in to our section so they have it closed it in order to clear them out. Whatever the explanation, we are clearly in the process of experiencing a cluster-fuck.
At about 11:30, Debbie and I have made it to the front of the crowd to see that, indeed, nobody is getting into the purple section. By this time, my bladder is really pressing in on me and Debbie's toes are numb. We make the decision to give up, figuring that we have experienced the crowd, though not the happy, inaugural party crowd we had pictured. We figure we might as well get somewhere where we can see and hear the ceremonies and speech rather than just the frustrated chants of “no second term” and “let us in” that are starting up around us.
Before we head off to find Kate-n-David and Johnny who are sitting with glasses of champagne and roast beef sandwiches in front of a plasma TV on the 12th floor of a swanky, but more importantly warm condo overlooking Pennsylvania avenue, I find an un-trampled shrub behind which to relieve myself.
We arrive at Kate's aunt and uncle's place just as Obama is taking the oath and giving his speech. It is great. We all stand with pride for the National Anthem, some of us for the first time in 8 years. We watch every second, even the c-span coverage of the coat-check before and after the luncheon. We drink the moment down with cups of French onion soup until the juice runs down our chins. From the roof, we even have a direct view of the parade, right where the Obamas get out of the car to walk.
In the end, our inauguration isn’t quite the popular, of the people and with the people type of celebration and experience that we have imagined, but hot toddy's and plasma screens have their appeal as well.
O, O, O-bama!
From far and wide,
from around the world,
from states north and south
of colors red and white and blue,
we stand with pride and sally forth
saying thank you, thank you, Thank You!
And we pray, “Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead man, and when white will embrace what is right.”
Amen.
But let me rewind a few days, because this is really part of a big weekend and beyond that a bigger socio-eco-political movement that has been sweeping America off it’s barka-loungers…
Our journey began on Saturday when Kate, David, baby Alice, Johnny, Debbie and I drove out of town in a Budget mini-van, destination Camelback, PA. We arrived in time to check in to our local ski lodge-cum-hotel, before heading to a Japanese restaurant called Shiro, a huge hibachi and sushi house with like 50 tables, a dance floor, a magician/animal balloon specialist and more. Kind of crazy in the middle of Pennsylvania, but it was packed and quite good. If you build it, right? And if there is one thing that I can eat a lot of, it’s sushi. Now, I’m not in a Claudia French league, but if she (at her Italian 5’5” and 105 pounds) represents the NBA slam-dunk championship of sushi eating ability, then I’m probably hitting final-four levels. Allez-hop!
After stuffing our faces we returned to the hotel where we slipped under our cozy comforters for a cup of hot cocoa before bed. The
snow had already begun to fall and we woke up Sunday morning to 4" inches of “freshie” and more gently falling from the sky. After we gorged ourselves on a breakfast of scrapple (Pennsylvania's answer to Spam) and pancakes and bacon and waffles the like (Johnny even had a piece of homemade pumpkin pie), we hit the hill. I mean this, the hill, literally and metaphorically. Camelback has something like 400' of verticalish feet of skiing. There are double-black diamonds, but they’re something like blue squares for us west coast ski snobs, so I have to think of it as a ski hill and not a ski mountain.It was Debbie's first time, which was fun, but I quickly realized how difficult, and probably pointless, it is to explain a complicated physical choreography like getting two big sticks strapped to your feet to run smoothly over snow and ice (and the occasional ski pole or thigh). I should have used the inner game of skiing approach, I guess. In the end, everybody had a good time and Debbie looked incredibly cute in her ski gear.
There was also a kind of a funny moment when we were renting our equipment, if you consider my clenched cheeks (top and bottom) combined with a sort of wheezing sound and slow head bobbing as a sign that I was finding it funny. Debbie didn’t have her purse with her so both sets of rentals went on my credit card and ID. The whole thing was computerized, with a special scanner for the driver’s license and everything, so all you had to do was give your height and weight and it automatically spit out your name, address, rental agreement and even binding settings and sugg
ested ski lengths for the kid behind the next counter. After giving them my information, it was Debbie’s turn. As if telling the girl her weight wasn’t bad enough, her information immediately popped up on the screen based on my account which the girl showed us and asked us to verify. It read DEBBORA LAPIN along with the address etc. etc. When the rental girl asked if everything was correct, we both went into the wheezing and head bobbing thing which I describe above and which the rental girl took as a yes. Camelback Mountain Resort, PA now pronounces you man and wife!David, who is responsible for that last line, had a great fall that we wished we had caught on film. We were trying to cut across runs through a closed path and there was one of those orange mesh fences with closed signs that was on the ground across the entry. We figured we would just pop over and be on our merry way, so we pushed off and David was first to cross but he didn't realize or wasn't able to jump his skis, especially the tips, all the way over the fence. When his tips got caught in the fence and quickly decelerated to a stop, David was flung forward into the snow in what skiers like to call a yard sale. It would have surely been an instant YouTube classic (more hits than Jesse Long falling off a camel guaranteed!), if only we had perfected the 24/7 inner-eye recording device that I'm sure will make future generations all stars of their own reality shows. When I stopped laughing and offered to film it, David was not gracious enough to replay the event.
After skiing, we headed off to Hagerstown, Maryland, home of the Hennebergers. David had called ahead and they were preparing a big après-ski fajita feast for our arrival. David warned us not to ask his dad about his days as a swinging disco owner, but told us that he used to be in the hotel industry and his step-mom had a side business with her daughter “Dobbie” as bar-tenders for private parties and the like. Let me say that the Hennebergers lived up to their reputations as hospitality industry professionals. We ate and drank and talked ourselves silly until the wee hours in the morning, only stopping to bathe our bloated bodies in the Jacuzzi.
We got back in our mini-van Monday morning and headed off to the sweet sounds of xylophone U2 lullabies which we often had to play for hours at a time in the hope that it would drive baby Alice to nap before the rest of us to pushed long sharp metal objects deep into our eardrums.
Nevertheless, we arrived in one peace at the Rope’s residence, in the heart of DC, a few blocks from the National Cathedral (everything in DC is the National something), St Albans and The Sidwell Friends School where Kate’s Mom will soon be helping little Malia memorize the names of all the presidents and other such oh-so-sixth grade activities--she’s already 1/44th of the way there without even opening a book, right? After a light lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Kate-n-David took us on a little tour of the capital. Although it was the day before the inauguration and you could sort of sense the excitement hiding behind every faux ionic column, the streets remained fairly crowd and closure free.
Fast forward through dinner, another early night to bed and a veritable monastic morning of Odwalla Superfood (the perfect balance of juice puree, artichoke dust and thistle, with a little prairie grass thrown in for flavor that would get me through the big day without needing a restroom. I mean, hey, it's called super food, what could be better than that?) and you are now in the same gastrointestinal-psychological-spiritual state as I was on Tuesday morning, January 20, 2009, aka O-day.
We left the Rope’s house at about 8 am and jumped on an already crowded DC metro to Judiciary Square. The atmosphere was charged with excitement. Complete strangers were making room for each other on the subway cars, smiling, talking and sharing stories. Some of them even New Yorkers!
After getting out of the metro, Debbie and I parted ways with Kate-n-David and Johnny. Our tickets directing us to where we needed to pass through the Purple security gate which was scheduled to open at 9am.
We walked up E street and turned the corner onto First St. NW to discover that there was nothing between us and the security gate except about four blocks of completely packed human bodies. Well, I thought, the security gate hasn’t opened yet.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…
It’s now about 10:30 am and we have only moved 100 feet, I think to myself that they must be really screening people carefully or maybe they don’t have enough screeners. This is making the TSA look like the Mossad, right? Pretty soon though, rumors start to circulate that the street is barricaded and the security gate a block or so after that isn’t even open. People are saying that it is closed because people have sneaked in over night and they are trying to clear them out. Later the story is that people with other ticket colors have broken through a barrier and gotten into our section.
As time passes and people’s begin losing patience and feeling in their extremities, attrition sets in as people decide to leave and look for a warm room with a television or maybe just another crowded area that at least has a view of a JumboTron. Some come from the front of the crowd reporting that they have been there since 5:00 am. They can’t take it anymore, “abort, abort.” Others explain that they have gotten stuck in the crowd and don’t even have tickets, but are just trying to get to the Mall or to the other side of the street. The stream of people leaving allows us to periodically move forward, giving us the illusion of progress, and then the progress is lost as someone in the crowd passes out or calls for medical attention and the ambulance parked half a block back turns on its lights and tries to plow its way to the rescue. Most of the time it doesn’t make it and the EMTS settle for passing a medical bag across the crowd to a waiting doctor or good Samaritan.
At about 11:15, 15 minutes before the ceremonies are scheduled to begin, the barricade at 1st and C is removed (or shoved aside?) and the crowd surges forward. Finally we think, our patience has been rewarded. We feel sorry for the people who were there before us and have given up, but we understand that they were about 4 hours more cold and hungry than us.
As the crowd moves ahead, we are happy to be making real progress, but it is also scary to think what would happen if, god forbid, we were to fall or faint. As it is, landscaping, flowers beds and even whole sections of shrubbery are being trampled without remorse. A big black woman who is bushwhacking her way in front of us yells for anyone who cares to listen, “I ain’t holdin’ no bushes for nobody, I ain’t holding no more bushes. I tell you I’ve been holding bushes for 8 years and I’ve had it!” It’s a good line.
The crowd has been pretty friendly up till now, with different groups of people joking amongst themselves or trading ironic observations about the lack of organization, the stupidity of crowds, the cold and so on, but people are starting to get frustrated. Most people just want to know what the heck is going on, so we continually ask people pushing their way out of the pack what they have seen, did they have tickets, have they seen the gate?Once again the crowd is stopped and I have the idea of starting an information tree. I ask the people in front of us to pass the
message along to the people in front of them and so on to the front of the crowd asking them to send information back down about just what the heck is going on. The people in front of us ask the person in front of them to find out what was going and she says over her shoulder, “I can’t see anything.” And that is it. It’s too many instructions for a big crowd. I consider explaining the system again, but realize it probably won’t make it half a block. Another foliage casualty to add to the list; the information tree has just died on the vine in front of our eyes.As the minutes pass, my bladder and ankles begin to swell and it doesn’t look like we are going to make it in time. People are giving up hope and courtesy and begin shoving rather than sliding their way out bringing with them word that the security gates are still not open. Nobody is being let in. Some people are saying that the CIA hasn’t given the word to start the screening process and that it is just a miscommunication. Others say that people have snuck in to our section so they have it closed it in order to clear them out. Whatever the explanation, we are clearly in the process of experiencing a cluster-fuck.
At about 11:30, Debbie and I have made it to the front of the crowd to see that, indeed, nobody is getting into the purple section. By this time, my bladder is really pressing in on me and Debbie's toes are numb. We make the decision to give up, figuring that we have experienced the crowd, though not the happy, inaugural party crowd we had pictured. We figure we might as well get somewhere where we can see and hear the ceremonies and speech rather than just the frustrated chants of “no second term” and “let us in” that are starting up around us.
Before we head off to find Kate-n-David and Johnny who are sitting with glasses of champagne and roast beef sandwiches in front of a plasma TV on the 12th floor of a swanky, but more importantly warm condo overlooking Pennsylvania avenue, I find an un-trampled shrub behind which to relieve myself.
We arrive at Kate's aunt and uncle's place just as Obama is taking the oath and giving his speech. It is great. We all stand with pride for the National Anthem, some of us for the first time in 8 years. We watch every second, even the c-span coverage of the coat-check before and after the luncheon. We drink the moment down with cups of French onion soup until the juice runs down our chins. From the roof, we even have a direct view of the parade, right where the Obamas get out of the car to walk.
In the end, our inauguration isn’t quite the popular, of the people and with the people type of celebration and experience that we have imagined, but hot toddy's and plasma screens have their appeal as well.
O, O, O-bama!From far and wide,
from around the world,
from states north and south
of colors red and white and blue,
we stand with pride and sally forth
saying thank you, thank you, Thank You!
And we pray, “Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead man, and when white will embrace what is right.”
Amen.
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