Dave is…
Celebrating, like the rest of this city.
Crowd at Union Square
Wow, I really can’t describe the atmosphere in the city last night. It was like I imagine V – E Day was or New York’s equivalent of celebrating a World Cup victory.
All day long people were on edge. I had a ton of work to do for this research project I’ve been working on with the NYCLU but I couldn’t focus at all. I had friends who lit out really early cause they just couldn’t sit still. Everyone was keyed up and the lines at the polling places were ridiculous. I spent half my afternoon trying to figure out where to watch it.
I ended up in Dumbo at the recently moved Galapagos Art Space (a bar) which was having a big election night party with a projection screen showing election coverage and all sorts of other entertainment. The bar itself has a pretty cool design with couches and talking circles built off a central walkway all of which sits a few inches above an indoor “pond”. And entertainment included a presidential kissing booth that at some point featured Monica Lewinsky (a fake, and really a pretty dated joke) and the promise of some sort of blue Cosmo if Obama won. Personally I think the idea of celebrating victory with a Cosmo is why the red states hate us but hey. Best of all there was a “doctor” in the house (really was the owner of the joint in a Halloween costume) who was handing out doctors notes for work tomorrow. That’s pretty hysterical.
The show really got started around 8pm when the hosts hit the stage. Now I have to say, I hated the hosts. It was pretty typical hipster Brooklyn stuff, which is to say inexplicable and awful. It was a guy/girl combo the girl in a sort of cheer skirt and a flag wrapped around her top and the guy in a super duper tight red white and blue spandex outfit. We are talking so tight that you could trace the outline of both his balls and the intimate contours of his dick from the back of the room where we were sitting. And he wasn’t exactly the sort of dude who should be near spandex in the first place.
Anyway they got up there to emcee and of course, cause they are Brooklyn hipsters, they decide to do it in silly voices with strange accents. I mean I got to tell you nothing says American democracy like silly foreign accents and baby voices. So they were up there rambling and acting like self aware (of course) five year olds on stage, asking inane trivia questions that were actually supposed to be jokes (jokes of course would need to be funny) and giving away drinks but generally just being mystifying.
Luckily for most of the rest of the evening they restricted such nonsense to commercial breaks and otherwise CNN’s audio was on. The exception to this was when they would come on to introduce the main extra attraction of the evening. The Yes We Can-Can Girls.
It’s exactly what it sounds like, (VIDEO HERE) it was a troupe of girls in burlesque doing can-can routines whenever they called a state for Obama. Most of their acts ended with them in a line with their rear ends up facing the audience. On each girl’s butt was sewn a letter so together their asses spelled out Obama. Occasionally to change it up they’d end a brief routine by lying on top of each other so you could read it going down. I have to say it was bizarre, it was strange but it was pretty entertaining. I mean I went looking for unusual and I got it. I dunno much about can-can of course but I have no objection to girls in burlesque gear dancing around in lieu of listening to yet another Verizon ad.
And while their routines started to look pretty familiar it was ok cause they were coming out so often cause the states started falling for Obama. The crowd at this point had had just enough time to get drunk and get excited so the buzz in the room was just growing and growing. When CNN called Virginia ten minutes to the hour the excitement in the room began to build towards a fever pitch and when the inevitable happened and they called the West Coast and the election for Obama the place just exploded. It was such a cool moment. I worked for over a year in the finance office of the Kerry Campaign and I was at the campaign’s “victory” headquarters in Boston last election and watched the realization we lost sweep through the place Poe’s Red Death and this was about as far on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum as its possible to be. As I texted Jeff later, “You know how we felt on Saturday? This is the exact opposite.”
Wow it felt good. About time we Americans didn’t fuck up an election. I was so happy I didn’t even care that the stupid host had taken her flag top off and was waving it around with nothing on but a pair of boy shorts and two strategically placed Obama stickers. (Again that’s the kinda thing that makes conservatives hate us.) I was too busy texting back and forth with everyone I know. Shoot, I even got a call from Cameroon and the next morning had emails from places as far away as Poland. Everyone’s celebrating.
I stayed at Galapagos, savoring the victory until after the speeches (Damn did I wish I was in Chicago) and then headed into Manhattan to meet Jeff (different Jeff) and hopefully my roommate if he could ever make it out of the NY Times office. The streets outside were just chaos. Everyone yelling and running around drunk on victory, and conventional alcohol. The subway ride uptown was insane, each car packed with people, mostly the young who would wait until we pulled into a station and the doors opened before EXPLODING in cheers and yells and then let the buildup start all over again on the way to the next stop.
But that was nothing compared to the insanity at Times Square. It was over an hour after they called it and the place was still wall to wall with people going crazy celebrating. People were just running around laughing, screaming, crying, and hugging each other. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It was nuts. It was like everyone in the city was so excited they were afraid they would explode if they didn’t let it out somehow. Jeff and I stayed there savoring it until the cops finally began to half heartedly try to at least clear people off Broadway so traffic could move. Then, still too keyed up to go home we ducked over to 9th Ave and the legendary Rudy’s for a drink and the kind of shouted conversation necessary in bar wall to wall with people celebrating. We didn’t leave there till after 3am and Times Square was still rowdy. Shoot with train construction I didn’t get home till well after 4am and I was still so wired up it was hard to go to sleep. I don’t think I have felt this kind of giddy optimism in I dunno how long. What a night.