Well hello and welcome to my "Part 2". I set out to write solely about my experiences for the Rally but suddenly out came all that other stuff about the evolution of my eagerness turned disillusionment leading up to this Rally. So, if it interests you, fix those pretty retinas here.
So Stewart and Colbert are throwing this Rally and Arianna Huffington is providing free buses. Awesome! I normally don't try and gravitate towards crowds like this, but it was worth it! These guys were coming together for something positive and, more importantly, funny! I was in. I knew it would be a lot of people because of the press it was getting. When Oprah mentioned it I knew it would be even crazier. What I didn't know is that, due to incredibly poor planning for the 10,000 people Arianna Huffington so graciously bussed in for free, the story I will be telling my grandchildren is a lot more embarrassing and uneventful than it ought to be.
Here's the scoop. You invite 10,000 people to meet you at Citi-Field in Queens at 4:30 a.m. for a 5:00 a.m. departure time, you should probably organize. We got to the stadium at the ass-crack o' dawn and the Huffington Post folk were all very sweet but none of them really had anything useful to say or do. We had to form our own "line" and police ourselves, which grew more and more impossible as each 7 train that arrived dumped more and more people off. Eventually our long squiggly poor-excuse of a "line" became just a mass of people. Oh yeah, and we clearly did not leave anywhere close to 5am. We stood out in the cold for hours. Our buses were all lined up waiting for us, so why were we waiting there? Well, around 6:40 or so, Ms. Arianna Huffington herself came by with her cameras and shook people's hands and evidently hand-picked people to come with her on her bus. I am pretty sure we had to wait for her to get this photo-opportunity before we could leave because soon after she was done...things started to happen. Now, once again....NO organization from the HP peeps. Just a mass exodus toward the buses. You can guess it, my friends and I...and several other hundred people who had been standing patiently since 4:30 a.m. were now the last to board buses, while folks who just arrived at 6:30 and should have MISSED it entirely got on first. Yet we remained patient and calm, all-be-it irritated and cold. Finally we board our bus, which looked like it was stolen off a movie set. Our janky bus from 1969 still had an old school scrolling destination sign on it and there was a sign in the window that said "Jimmy". Our bus driver looked like one of Tony Soprano's peons and definitely looked like a Jimmy. We were informed just before we left that his name wasn't "Jimmy", it was "Jude". We still aren't entirely sure of this "Jimmy"'s whereabouts but we have our suspicions. Now our bus stank and the heat wasn't working. I was confident it would at some point but, no, it never did. The ride was long. The bathroom nasty. Jude kept pulling off the road to go to the bathroom. We hit traffic and after a while we couldn't see any more buses on the road with us. It was after 12pm and we were still on this bus! Jude informed us that his G.P.S. just went out and he was going to have to ask for directions. We wondered if he was even supposed to be part of this whole trip to begin with, he seemed like he just stole a bus and went along for the ride. Suddenly we start seeing national monuments off in the distance, realizing we are now IN the city. We weren't supposed to be dropped off there, we were supposed to go to a stadium about 10 minutes by subway away and we were on our own to get in to the National Mall. One of the passengers uses his G.P.S. on his phone to navigate us where we need to be and Jude drops us off a few blocks from the Mall at 1:30 p.m. With an hour and half left before the mass exodus to the subway and then buses, we get as close as we can to the field. We didn't have a chance. It occurs to me that even had we arrived on time, we wouldn't have a had a chance. You would have had to be in early that morning to get a spot anywhere near the action. Sure, I have lived in NYC long enough to know you can't just show up at the start time of the movie at Bryant Park and get a spot on the lawn but I thought this was different. There had been SO MUCH MEDIA about this I sort of imagined Arianna Huffington would be interested in us actually SEEING something once she bussed us there but obviously she couldn't care less about that, let alone getting us there before the Rally began. We stand near urinals listening to the muffled sounds of, probably Jon Stewart. We can't make out anything on the screens or stage. We walk around a wee bit. We are hungry, so we go wait in line for a hot dog. Then we wait in line for the Smithsonian restrooms. We walk around for another 5 minutes before I suggest we start to head to the subway. In about 5 minutes, the millions of people at that Rally will be doing the same thing. We patiently wait for the subway for about 40 minutes only to find a new line has formed since the Rally let out and we are all filtering into the same stairwell. Once again we patiently do what's "right" while a bunch of other fools essentially cut us. But what can ya' do? Once in the subway terminal things went way faster than I had imagined and soon enough we were on a newer, less janky/smelly, sans mobster-driver bus. It was on our journey home that we found out that all the other buses were given free snacks. Yeah. Free yogurt from Stonybrook, free pistachio nuts, and free Coca-Cola. Our bus got NUTTIN'. Maybe Jude ate it all.
That's what happened when I went to the Rally kids. Grandma rode on a janky bus for 6 hours just to eat a hot dog and pee before turning around and coming back and watching clips of what she missed while she was there on the internet.
Am I a little irked with Arianna for treating us as props to make her look fantastic in the media while feigning interest in our participation once her free buses dropped us off late? Of course. Do I wish I could still get my hands on those pistachio nuts? It'd be cool. But do I regret going to the Rally? I don't think so. At the end of the day, this Rally was HUGE. HUUUUUUGE! A police officer in D.C. said he hasn't seen anything this big in years (other than Obama's Inauguration). It would have never been that HUGE if it weren't for all the media attention Ms. Huffington created with this free bus bullshit. Thousands of people got together FOR something. Something positive and funny. I still can't understand why some media were forbidden by their employers to cover the Rally, but regardless of that fact, people still know what happened that day and how many people came to support it. And I did too....it's not my fault the day was a huge-ass bust for me and my friends. I went. That's something I can be proud to tell my grandkids. Now I better get busy over here and start on the kid part first 'cause I'm gonna be one crazy-awesome Grandma!
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