Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

View from the silver ticket section, next to the reflecting pool.

Nearly 1:30, we pass Tom Hanks as he stands outside a row of "porta potties," waiting for his wife. He's obliging excited tourists by taking pictures with them, so we gather our group and take a picture, too. One son has gone off on his own, and we call him back. Hanks tells him, "don't worry, young man, everybody's yelling at you, but it's okay. Come on in."


1:50, finally arrive at the Liaison hotel, nearly two hours late. I can finally get a cell phone signal, which the Secret Service had been jamming all morning near the Capitol. By the time we get upstairs and I can finally get upstairs to my set-up, there is no set-up. By the time I reach the program director at Hot 105, it's too late to run a line, and the engineer has gone. I greet the host at sister station WEDR as he sets up, and phone in a call to James T. Not the way I'd planned it, but the best we can do at the moment.

2:30, back on the streets, we're trying to find the Metro. The streets are being quickly abandoned, newly repopulated with assorted refuse, paper, cups and bottles, but not a single newspaper. Those, people are hanging on to. The kids, cousin and husband are too tired and too cold to schlep to the Lincoln Memorial, Smithsonian, and the other sites I had hoped to see. So it's on to Union Station. We buy souveniers for the kids' friends back in Florida. We walk about a block, and stop by a group of vendors selling "official programs," and dressed like Abraham Lincoln, in paper top hats. We run into a cousin I haven't seen in like ten years. He's selling posters by the side of the road (he's really a travel agent, but explains that the posters are some sort of fundraiser for a youth organization he volunteers with.) We buy a coupld of posters, and at 2:45, I phone in my final, not-the-way-I-planned-it call to the radio station at 2:45. We buy more souveniers.

3:00, across the street from Union Station, a group of vendors are doing a brisk business. We sign a national unity tapestry and receive a certificate, on which we pledge to do our part to remake America, along with President Obama.

Street vendors do a brisk business across from Union Station after the inaugural.

Inside Union Station, we board the wrong train. When it reaches its last stop, we swap the incorrect blue line for orange, to New Carolton.

3:50, back at New Carolton, we get off the train, and phone a cousin to come and pick us up. My daughter Winsome forgets her souveniers on the train. I'm certain I must have, too. Downstairs, we surprisingly run into my friends from the Virgin Islands, whom I'd fretted that we'd missed, and take pictures with them. They're going to the Southern Ball.


4:00 or thereabouts, we're back at my cousin's house in Bowie. My hands and feet are numb. I open my wallet, and find the souveniers that I thought I'd lost. They consist of three pins: one depicts the new First Family, one, the new administration, and the third says: "I was there."