A Post I Wrote Before Clinton’s Speech, but didn’t have internet to post. Note: Post Speech: Even more proud!
A story in which Hillary Clinton walks right by me, hours before she is to give her big convention speech, and Chelsea gives me that look like - “hey, weren’t we once at a big gay party with some former-mormon former-stripper talking about how we share all the same circles of bffs?!” - but before I could confirm, yes, yes indeed we have been there and done that, they were whisked into the service elevator and off to their hotel room.
I have long lost the tendency to actually be star struck by most people. (Hey, Patti Smith is not Most People!) I’ve met all the Clintons numerous times and, frankly, I personally felt let down by much of their recent campaign. I have credentials to hear Hillary speak tonight, but I’m also suppose to hang with The Advocate crew backstage at the HRC concert with Rufus Wainwright, Cyndi Lauper and Melissa Etheridge; which, oddly, is at the same time as the speeches. And so, I am going to give my evening’s credentials to a friend. i figured I would just watch Hillary’s speech on TV or online later. I was okay with that.
But I am sitting here in the entry to some hotel, catching my breath before heading off to another reception. This is when Hillary, Chelsea and their entourage walk quickly by.
A middle aged, middle American woman is sitting next to me now, unwilling to leave in case Hillary walks by again and this woman can meet her. She is, quite literally, shaking.
I have met Hillary Clinton. Several times now. Each time, to tell the truth, I became a little less enamored.
Perhaps this fact is due to the grandiose style of our first meeting. I was nineteen, I believe, and on and off homeless and crashing on couches. I had borrowed a suit and begged my way into a large breakfast event where she was to be speaking. I was so poor that I could not afford bus fare. It was at a fancy hotel in downtown San Francisco on the top of Nob Hill, and I had convinced someone to let me stand in the back of a ballroom to hear her speech.
When I was a kid in my hicktown, I LOVED the Clintons. I wanted them to adopt me. I totally convinced my child self that they would hate everyone and everything that had ever harmed me and, well, that was probably true. That belief helped me believe in a world other, better, than the one I had been born into. It mattered to me.
So there I was, a nineteen year old, homeless city official, sweating in a borrowed suit. I don’t recall exactly how the series of events happened, but somehow I kept locating the person in power and then the next level of the person in power and apparently befriending all the right people. It went from my being allowed to stand in the back of the room to somehow getting invited into the small reception room where, before breakfast, folks could pay something like $2,000 dollars to have their photo taken with Clinton. I don’t remember the details, but at the last minute, as the reception cleared out, the staffers throwing the event ran past me, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me along with them into the room where they were posing with Hillary. After everyone had taken their photos and were leaving the room, some kind kind woman walked me over to Clinton and introduced me as a “special guest” and asked if I could have my photo taken with her.
As Hillary and I stood there, holding our hands in a posed hand shake, between the US and CA flags, I am fully certain that I must have been shaking. The room had cleared out, leaving only me, Hillary, the photographer, one of Hillary’s assistants and a couple in a corner of the room. Secret Service kept telling Hillary that she needed to hurry to get to her speech. I was nervous as all hell, but somehow I blurted out something embarrassing like, “I grew up in a bad situation, and was a kid of the system who fell through all the cracks and was homeless, but I hold public office now and am going to school and I was so inspired by you when I was a little girl!”
I have no idea how or why I did that, but I did. Hillary had just returned from vacation, and was in a particularly relaxed mood that morning. As I was totally just in a daze, she told the secret service people to wait, grasped my hands and kept hugging me and telling me how proud she was of me. I was in shock. And then, as if in a dream world, she asked me for my contact information, so that she could stay in contact with me. Now, mind you, I had been around politics for years, and knew that even if you gave an elected your contact info, they would just hand it off to their assistant to pocket. But there was Hillary Clinton, holding my hands and asking me how to get a hold of me in the future! I was dying.
As if all of that was not enough, she then grasped my hands again and pulled me towards the couple in the corner. She told me that she wanted to introduce me to one of her best friends. She took me over there and told the couple that I was a special kid and that she wanted them to keep an eye on me when she wasn’t in the Bay Area. The couple was Susie and Mark Buell.
Shortly after that we all got whisked downstairs, I’m sure I was still shaking from shock, but I was then escorted to a VIP seat at one of the front tables at the breakfast. Hillary spoke with large windows of a foggy SF morning behind her. I was in heaven.
I later got sent the photos from that morning, and cherished them for years. Susie ended up starting a program to train women to run for public office and she invited me to be the youngest member of the first class. Hillary’s office only contacted me to invite me to VIP, really expensive, fundraisers at her home in DC. Ha.
Four years ago, when I was newly accepted to Harvard and trying to raise the funds to move cross country, I didn’t think that I would be able to make it. That DNC I watched from my couch at home. It was weeks before my move was suppose to be, and it didn’t look like I would be able to afford to move and attend my dream program. I was incredibly stressed and sad when I sat there that one evening and some skinny guy with a funny name, running for the IL Senate seat gave a speech. I’ll always remember the lines: “That girl on the South Side of Chicago, and thousands of others like her - who have the grades, have the drive, but don’t have the money to go to college. We have to do more for them!” I was crying during that convention speech as well.
As soon as the Bay Area Democrats returned from that convention, something changed; something had happened. They came together and organized to raise the funds I needed to move to Harvard. This effort was spearheaded by Susie Buell, who made a donation to my Harvard-move fund, and then emailed her friends my story and a call out to the community to help me out.
I ended up making it to Harvard.
While at Harvard I lived with a great gal who basically grew up in the Clinton family, and they became much less a distant legend and much more so a family of politicians who sometimes I respected and sometimes I disagreed with. The times I saw Hillary after that original day, it was like she never recalled the original meeting. I was never able to interact with her in a manner where my re-telling of it would trigger her memory. My interactions with Chelsea have just been casual and social. In just a manner of years I’ve transformed from that shaking and awestruck kid to a more cynical policy and political analyst.
And yet, I will admit it - sitting here in this fancy hotel lobby on a hot day, when Senator Clinton suddenly walked by, I felt a sudden rush of that admiration and respect I felt on that long ago San Francisco morning. I almost wish I had found a way to jump up and stop their march to the elevator to tell her thank you for what she’s done, although I doubt secret service would have allowed such an attempt at interaction. I may not agree with all of how she did it and I may still be watching to see that she now acts in a manner that will best serve the country come November - but, on the whole, viewing the long term implications of all that she has done, I am grateful.
(Note: I’ve written this post while still sitting in that hotel lobby, now late for my reception. Throughout the writing of this, a crew of swarmy swarmy political men have circled about, boasting to each other about their connections to the Senator and their hopes for the outcome of this week. And, alas, it is hard to balance the rechanneling of my younger, more sentimental self with the present me that feels the urge to glare at these men and my knowing that they would break down snickering if only they were to know the kindly tinted recollection I’m writing about the Hillary I first met. And on that note: Off to my cocktail hour! I’m not staking out the Clinton pre-speech exit, and I still am going to the concert and giving another friend my credentials. But I remember now that I am still grateful. )
