1 I've told ya before, and will probably tell ya again: I was a member of the 200-piece marching band that proudly marched in Nixon's first inaugural parade. There's a lot of back-story, but the important thing is that we were there, and going to stay the week.


A fun part of it was that although most of us were too young to drink (not myself), my roommate and I had purchased a fifth of bourbon and realized we needed glasses to drink it from. Having spotted a pizzeria at the other end of the quad, we rounded up a bunch of the gang and went for pizza, and Terry and I "pinched" our glasses when we left. We were in town all that week and drank our bourbon during that time. On the last night in town, we got everybody together again for pizza, and returned our glasses as part of the fun. Hey... Republicans don't steal!

2 Great story Dana! If it had been at Carter's inaugural they'd have stolen the glasses, the beer pitchers, and probably the pizza pans too!

3 You're probably right.
I remember going to the Smithsonian, especially the aeronautical section. Years later I took Martha there and showed her some of the same "ancient" aero-engines.

There's another story from that Inauguration. We had a woman Marine in the band with us, who'd been stationed in Washington, and we asked her to take us to a nice restaurant. She did. But it seems that we got a rookie waitress; just about everything we ordered came out wrong, or nearly so. She was rattled and it showed. Everything was "close but no cigar," you know? When she brought the bills, she cringed and asked "Was ANYTHING all right?" We told her, "Honey, everything was GREAT!" and we loaded the table down with tips. Now, I'm not going to say she may not have been counting on that; probably was, in fact... She might have spotted a college crowd. No matter; we all had a great time!

4 I've had days like that meself Dana. Being a server is a tough job, especially when you don't know what you are doing yet (and with the amount of turnover that's a lot of 'em.)