Have you ever had one of “those” days?
So, I went to an Inaugural Ball last night and I can fairly say that my experience was a complete disaster. The father of my date, we will call her Girlfriend, is tightly connected with the Republican Party and we were supposed to have tickets to the Texas/Wyoming Ball. Actually, we had no tickets but were supposedly on a “VIP list” and were supposed to tell a guy with a clipboard that we were on this list. If that didn’t work, we were supposed to ask for our sponsor, who we will call Jack Morley. A group of us got all gussied up in tuxedoes and formal gowns and set out in freezing weather to make our way down to the Washington Convention Center (WCC). All of the streets were close around the WCC and the Metro stop there was closed for security reasons. As we tried to hail a cab, a Holiday Inn van stopped and told us to get in, the driver explaining openly that he was on the take to get back at his boss and had been making these “unscheduled drops” all night long. We made it to the WCC but found out we were not on the VIP list of the clipboard guy, so we had to call Jack Morley. This guy actually comes back out of the ball and comes to the street where we were held up and instructs the clipboard guy (turns out to be an FBI agent) that our group is “OK.” He showed a lapel pin as his credential and explained he was “with the White House.” Apparently that lapel pin carries weight because we would soon learn that it was quite a powerful piece of brass and enamel.Because we had no tickets, we had to follow this guy around to get into the WCC. We went through security, where again the pin got us waved through, then entered the WCC main entrance. We actually made our way to the Independence Ball, where the President had just spoken and left. There we met other VIPs who did not have tickets and we explained to Jack Morley that we needed to get to the Texas Ball to meet family and friends. So the 12 of us VIPs set out for the Texas Ball following Jack and his lapel pin like he was the pied piper. Remember too that to this point we had not had the chance to get our first DRINK! After a few of these checkpoints I stopped making faces like “I’m with the important guy” and started acting like I was the guy wearing the magic lapel pin (mine was a U.S. flag).
We got into the Texas Ball and set a time to meet up later in the night, but promptly broke for the bar. The bar required the use of drink tickets, quite odd for a formal affair, but at that point I plopped down a Benjamin and said “give me tickets for this.”
I promptly buried myself into several straight Makers Marks and ended up stumbling around in a coma. Near the end of the evening I got into trouble with Girlfriend as I was apparently talking to strange women at the bar. The worst part of the whole event was that I was still drunk at 10:30 am the next day when I was an hour and a half late for a 5-hour meeting that included new vendors that I have never met and I am supposedly the manager of the team. I also found myself making ridiculous small talk on the elevator about completely inane subjects.
posted by Captain Heinous @ 1/21/2005 10:35:00 AM
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