There Is No More Appropriate Place

to hold an inaugural ball on the day of Barack Obama's inauguration than the Museum of American History. Well, there may be a few more appropriate places, but not too many. Wow. That's all I can say. I, a word person from the word go, can barely describe it.

For someone like me, the whole thing was much more like a movie I was watching, or a movie set I somehow wandered onto, than reality. But it was definitely real.

We walked through the door into a dark room with incredibly well-dressed people everywhere and three separate coat checks to the left. Chris headed for coat check immediately to rid himself of his sweatshirt and his long-sleeved t-shirt--they weren't the classiest things he could have been wearing--and immediately disappeared. I have no idea where he went. I, myself, disappeared in the women's bathroom to make myself look somewhat presentable, which took some skill. First of all, I had to find the thing. I figured if I followed the wall for long enough, I was bound to find a bathroom, and sure enough, it only took me five minutes or so to run into one. Then I had to get inside. That was easier said than done. I don't feel so bad, though, because there was another woman trying to get in who thought the door must be locked. It didn't look like a door. It was a big metal wall, probably fifteen feet high, with a handle set into it. I pushed. I pulled. She pushed. She pulled. To no avail. I backed up, confused. She wandered away to find another rest room. Then a woman finally came out of the bathroom and I saw that the doors did not push or pull at all. Instead, they slid. And here I thought I was good with high-tech gadgets.

I slipped into a stall and began the process of shedding layers. I took the long john shirt out from under my dress and tucked it into a plastic bag I had stashed in my purse. I thought about removing the socks from under my pantyhose, too, but that would have taken way too much effort and I'm not sure I would have gotten my pantyhose back on, since they were pretty much shredded from the knees up by that point. I tucked my scarf and gloves into my plastic bag as well, then slid my dress back on over my head and rearranged the neckline in the back, which was a weird floppy thing that I had nothing but trouble with. I did my best to tuck my socks down into my sexy, dusty, dirty black tennis shoes and straightened my pantyhose as much as possible without having them disintegrate in my hands. As I was walking out of the stall, my dad called. I don't generally answer my phone when I'm in the bathroom, but when my dad calls, I answer. You never know.

He was calling to tell me that the Obamas were attending the Neighborhood Ball, and that it was free, and that I should go there because Beyonce was singing. Since I had barely made it to the Michigan Ball at that point, and I was in possession of a $200 ticket for that one, I didn't necessarily consider his suggestion. I told him I had just gotten to the Museum and I was doing my best to make myself presentable, since I had been outside and in Union Station all day with no way to change. We got off the phone. The girl next to me said, "I know exactly what you mean. I got to go back to my hotel room and everything, and I still don't look presentable."

Let me describe to you what she looked like. She was about 5'5", maybe, and probably 125 pounds. Her shiny, chocolate-colored hair was arranged neatly into a bun at the back of her head, her lips were stained a delicate shade of pink, here eyes were discreetly mascaraed, and her finger nails were shiny and red. She was wearing a little black dress that ended probably six inches above her knees and still managed to look classy rather than skanky. She had on black nylons and black high heels that showcased her model-like legs perfectly. Compared to 300+ pound, 5'1" me, with my wrinkled red dress over a scraggly-looking gray one, my dirty sneakers, my runny pantyhose, my wind-blown hair, and my makeup-less face, she definitely looked presentable. Hell, next to Angelina Jolie at the Oscars, she would have looked presentable. Let's just say our conversation didn't do much to make me feel as if I fit in.

I finally made my way out of the bathroom and presented my plastic bag at coat check.

"This is it?" the man asked me. "No coat?"

"This is it," I told him. See, I had worn so many layers because I didn't have a coat that was both functional enough and classy enough to wear to both the inauguration and the ball, hence all the layers. I was wearing a black sweater over my dresses, and it was quite warm in the building, probably because everyone else was wearing sleeveless ball gowns, but I couldn't take off my sweater because then the sleeves of the gray dress would show from under the sleeves of the red dress and I would be back to looking homeless. So, the bag of under layers was all I had to check. The man looked at me oddly, but he checked my bag. I swung my purse over my shoulder and set off to find Chris.

I finally found him standing in the crowd. We went through the line where they were taking tickets and we were finally in. Everything was beautiful. Absolutely breath-taking. The museum was all stairs and escalators and sleek gray surfaces and marble floors. The people were all sophisticated and dressed in rich shades of black and gray and red, and they were of all colors and sizes and backgrounds. I didn't know where to look first. We rounded a corner and found a buffet table, a bar, and an empty pub table with no chairs around it. We each filled a plate and made a bee-line for the table. It had been a while since we'd eaten. Once we were settled at the table, we started looking through the program booklets we'd been given. I, in fact, studied mine carefully, because Chris took off to go the bathroom and it was easier to be occupied with something than it was to watch everyone watching me, all alone and homeless-looking.

It was then that I discovered that the ball was not simply being held in a ballroom or some such thing. It was filling the whole museum. All three floors. Each floor was overflowing with people, buffets, bars, and music. One floor had a high school honors band playing. Another had a swing band. The first floor, in an atrium that was the height of the building, was home to a rock band that was playing to a crowd of hundreds who were dancing, shoulder to shoulder, on an enormous dance floor. And all the museum displays were open to us.

We spent the rest of the night talking to people (and finding out exactly who had gotten in to the Inauguration (our friends Miles and Marcella among them) and who hadn't (Jesse Jackson and Michigan State Senator Mike Prusi- and us, of course). We looked at many of the displays. We cringed because our feet hurt like hell and we couldn't keep up with Chris as he ran manically from one room to the next. Okay, that was just me. We ate more--braised beef over grits with Michigan cherry sauce, fish, chicken in cherry sauce, lots of things. We had drinks--I had orange juice because the first thing Chris ordered was a Jack and Coke that was about 95% Jack and I got drunk just smelling it. We just looked at everything in wonder. And took lots of pictures, of the ball and of each other.

I had been worrying all night about how we were going to leave the ball. Or rather, how we were going to get back to our hotel in Baltimore. It was colder than we had anticipated, much too cold to hang out outside all night, and they wouldn't let us into Union Station without train tickets. I checked online to see if there were Amtrak tickets left, because our cabbie had assured us that Amtrak ran all night, but to no avail. Everything was sold out. I had also saved the number of the cab company in my phone, because the cabbie had assured us as well that they could take us back to Baltimore. Also to no avail. The operator I talked to said that they were based in Arlington and would not go into Washington any more than night because so many streets were still blocked off. She gave me the name of another cab company. I looked them up online on my phone. Their website would not load for the longest time, ,and when it did, there was no phone number. I looked it up on Google. Nothing. I tried to use their online cab request form, but that didn't work either. I finally used the Internet White Pages and found a phone number. I asked Chris to call. He gave me a snotty look. I went outside where it was quiet and did it myself.

Except that I did nothing. No one answered. I tried several times. Chris eventually, to his credit, did come looking for me. He tried using the online request form. He tried calling. Nothing doing. And finally, finally, he said that since it was 11:30 already and the Ball ended at midnight, maybe we should go start looking for a cab on the street, before everyone else did. I was so grateful that I almost kissed him. I was in excruciating pain from standing on my feet and sitting on a cement floor all day, with leftover blisters from the day before covering the bottoms of my feet. So, we went inside, took a few more pictures, and tried to get through coat check without incident. I say tried because there was GayNaziCoatCheckAttendantMan micromanaging the people in line. Chris was well aware, since he had run into the man once before in an attempt to get outside and use his phone, but it was all new to me.

Coat check was not all that complicated. There were three sections: red, white, and blue. You gave them your stuff and you got a tag. Color-coded, even: red, white, or blue. So when you went to pick up your coat or whatever, you got in a line: red, white, or blue. Not at all complicated. Except that GayNaziCoatCheckAttendantMan was making everyone get in one line, then letting one person of each color through at a time. He would ask what color your tag was, point in the direction of the appropriate coat check, and scream out a color. If you tried to walk through and get into your line without his direction, he freaked. Screamed. Yelled. Wrung his hands.

"That's WHITE!" he'd scream, and stop you by placing his hand dead center on your chest. "I said BLUE!!!!!!!!!" Because it was SO complicated; we very obviously couldn't match colors and get in line by ourselves. Finally, we managed to get our stuff, and we each collected a poster from the event and a souvenir ticket. And we escaped.

We walked a couple of blocks to where we could see traffic moving freely. Better chance of getting a cab that way. Better, but not good. And that, my friends, I will leave for the rest of the story.