My picture from the USA Today is on the wall in the Washington state convention office! I got the first publicity for our state delegation. I got a standing ovation (OK, from one person) when I came in to get my credentials Monday morning. :-)
Went to the LGBT caucus this afternoon. I am apparently an idiot, as I managed to get the time wrong, so I took a taxi to the Sheraton at 10, only to find that the caucus didn't start until 12. The Sheraton was definitely the place to be, though - it was a madhouse of activity; caucuses, vendor tables, demonstrations, meet & greets - wow. Picked up the donkey pins my mother wanted, a few pins to give to the district back home, and a couple of keepsake pins for myself.
Barbara Boxer gave a wonderful speech at the LGBT caucus, as did General Claudia Kennedy. They had each state's LGBT delegation stand, in turn, which brought me to tears. That was simply beautiful. We had a little block of three of us for Washington; it should have been five, but I don't know where Representative Ed Murray or Lawrence Winnerman were sitting.
I wanted desperately to go to the veterans' caucus and see Max Cleland and James Carville, but it was happening at the same time as the LGBT caucus, and it was completely packed besides. They weren't letting anyone else in (although I found out later from Ray that he ended up doing the security, and I could have talked Ray into letting me in, I'll bet). Ray told me a beautiful story about Cleland at the caucus; the room was so overfilled that they were not allowing anyone else in, but a fellow in a wheelchair, a double amputee, came up to them and pleaded that he was supposed to be in the room, as he'd served with Cleland. Ray went to get Cleland to verify this, and when Max saw the man, he embraced him - both of them in their chairs - and set the whole room to weeping.
Then on to the convention itself. I started the convention day sitting up in the nosebleed seats with Matt Anderson, WAAAAY up in the rafters of the Fleet Center. We (Matt, basically, with me yelling in his ear) started using cell phones to pester the folks on the floor, because we could see there were unoccupied seats, and a lot of them, and we wanted DOWN there! Finally, the organizing queen, Nova Gattman, called up to us to ask if Geni was there, because she could be seated. I'd just gone to get a bottle of water, so they went running to find me. Found Nova, and it turned out she was actually looking for Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, but she shrugged and said, well, we found you and I don't know where the Senator is, so here you go. I got onto the floor!
Oh.My.GAWD.
Where do I even begin? How do you describe the sheer adrenaline rush, the excitement, of actually being on that convention floor, with a thousand cameras pointing at you, a cheering crowd of fellow political junkies around you, and your personal heroes on the podium just a few yards away? The closest analogy I can think of is the first time you walk into a Las Vegas casino - it's that kind of sensory overload. And it does not matter how tired you are when you first go into the hall, you get so charged up that it doesn't matter that you haven't slept, haven't eaten, and thought you were going to pass out if you stood up. You find yourself leaping up and down, fists in the air, signs waving, smiling, laughing, dancing. Exhilarating, astonishing, indescribable. I can see why people get addicted to this, why it's such a big deal to get to go. Now I understand.
It's an overwhelming experience to be on that convention floor. Your brain goes into total shutdown. The convention floor's like that. One minute, you have Jerry Springer or Judy Woodruff walking past, then Senator Patty Murray, then President-in-Exile Gore is speaking and the crowd is going wild. Cameras are in your face constantly, both still cameras and TV cameras, and there's reporters running around with pads of paper doing interviews non-stop.
Maybe, in the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, the best thing to do is post a picture. This is from my seat in the convention hall:
There was a tribute to the 9/11 victims that was unbelievably moving. First, a family member of some of the Flight 11 dead spoke, then they dimmed the lights and had a 17-year-old violin prodigy play Amazing Grace. Of all the songs to pick. That's the one that invariably brings me to tears, and to hear it from an unaccompanied violin in that context - we were all weeping. Lawrence and I had our arms around each other, supporting each other and sniffling.
Helped Lawrence fix his computer on the convention floor. (He didn't know how to get it to release its former IP address and renew with one from the DHCP server in the convention hall.) Everywhere I go, I end up fixing people's computers. I made Lawrence promise to give me a credit in HIS blog! We blogs are becoming a circular universe complete unto itself - All Hail the Blogosphere! hahaha!
The Microsoft party following the convention was perfectly awful - the worst Microsoft event I've ever been to. We were all really looking forward to it, as Microsoft normally puts on great parties, but this one - whoever planned it should never, ever be allowed near party planning again. We were all starving, thirsty, tired, and crabby, and they put us on buses that took 45 minutes to get out to the Kennedy Museum. Now, the Museum is very impressive, very moving, but we were all so tired and hungry that we raced through the Museum looking for food and saw virtually nothing of it. Then we get down to where there's supposed to be food, and it looks like they've brought a couple vegetable trays from Trader Joe's and a few bottles of cheap wine. There was no actual food, and the lines for the wine were a mile long, as they only had two people serving. We were furious. Then we all had to get on buses and ride the hour back to the hotel, still with no food. I ordered room service when I got to the hotel - I think we all did. What a lame party! I guess Javier went and really read the party organizers the riot act about what poor planning it was not to even provide us with food. We'd all have been much happier with much less fancy-pants surroundings and something decent to eat!
I did get to meet David Horsey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Seattle Times, however. That was a plus. I told him I thought his Red State-Blue State cartoon was quite possibly the single best piece of editorial cartooning I'd ever seen, to which he responded that I was obviously a very intelligent and perceptive person. ;-)
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