Wednesday, May 12, 2004

In Between Days

It's warm in Evanston now. Warmth in Evanston makes me think back to my youth, to wonder and possibility and beauty. It being the Chicago area, it only lasts a couple of days, as arctic cold gives way to searing jungle heat damn near instantly. As Marc has pointed out over in the <I>Strange Place, young office workers are sometimes subject to the Early Summer Crazy, in which the urge to quit the job and go dancing in the streets in freedom becomes very hard to resist. Every minute I sit behind this desk I get a little weaker and Charlie gets a little stronger...

I've had so many things I've wanted to write here and so little time and energy to do it in. I've forgotten them. Let's see what I remember of the highlights of last weekend:

On Friday night, I attended a Democratic National Committee fundraiser for "Young Professionals". I'm not sure I really count as a young professional, I'm really more of a young bohemian. Put the monkey in a jacket and tie and he's still a monkey right? But I attended of course, because Barack was present. The event was theoretically in honor of Hillary Clinton. Hillary is one of the strangest figures to me, because she is so loved and so hated and I don't really come down on either side. The insane hatred of her on the right can pretty much be chalked up to naked misogyny but I guess she's equally beloved for the same reasons, because she's a smart, powerful woman, of which there would seem to be plenty in the world. She's not one of my heroes or villains, so why she inspires the passion she does eludes me. Anyway, Hillary and the other big pols got up to give brief speeches at the end of the night but what I loved was that they all basically opened for Barack. I mean, Hillary opened for Barack, not the other way around. That was awesome. And he went on to give pretty much his standard brilliant stump speech but he prefaced it with the slightly disingenuous comment "Hillary was just saying to me". I mean it was like Abraham Lincoln saying "You know, my friend Bob said the other day that a house divided against itself cannot stand and I really agree with him". What a class act, that Barack.

The other really notable person there was Drew Barrymore, who's making a documentary about politics or something. Drew didn't speak, my only encounter with her came when I saw her interviewing the DNC Chairman. There was a mini-crowd gathering her and basking in her celebrity glow. I had to get through the to the other side of the crowd so my shoulders wound up brushing up against her shoulders. I vowed never to wash these shoulders again. I've broken that vow, though.

After that I went to Miss Molly Fitzgibbon's birthday party, with many of my actor friends. And they all spent much of the night saying bad things about Republicans. Same script, decidedly different production values. I was the only monkey in a jacket and tie there.