When I was in college, I had a part time job in Century City, CA, and the night Ronald Reagan was elected, I walked down the steps of my building and told the first stranger I saw that night that we had a new President. He was also a young person and said, “Yeah, I’m going to go see him right now. Wanna come?”
We walked across the boulevard and went into the bowels of the Century Plaza Hotel, where, in front of the Grand Ballroom, security men were checking people’s tickets. My new companion saw that one needed tickets to go in, and got creative. We went over to the side a few feet, he took out a couple of pieces of notebook paper out of his backpack and folded them to look like tickets. He put these into his front pocket and we attempted to go in through the ballroom door, with him gesturing briefly to his “tickets” as we passed “security.”
We were very early for the election night party, so we moved to the front of the standing room only area, only a few feet from the stage, and were later able to see Ronald Reagan accept his win. We were just students carrying big, bulky backpacks filled with books, but I’d like to think they would not have let us through if we had been terrorists with bags full of explosives.
Whoa! Cool, but all the same ...whoa!