I'm awfully excited, I really am. Not for the balls and the performers and the first dances, but the noon on the dot (EST) stuff tomorrow. The formal bits, the DC monuments, and the speech, about which I have personalized expectation I don't ever remember having before. But then again...things have never been this bad before.

I lived in the DC suburbs when I was a kid, and I still miss it at times like this. It's a great place to live when things are happening. You feel part of them. For instance, I have been thinking a lot about the Carter inaugural parade, to which my parents took me (I was 13). I remember it vividly, especially--mostly--as my toehold for my visuals--the color of Rosalynn's coat (colors really stick out in a town full of beige government buildings); a fact which would seem to lend great credence to the fabulous "cerulean" speech in The Devil Wears Prada. Although Rosalynn's coat was a little more turquoise than cerulean, but the point still stands.
















Somewhere in the sea of military in this next photo is my father, who as a sophomore naval cadet marched in Kennedy's inaugural parade in 1961. He remembers the unusual cold (I remember it being cold at Carter's), the terrible weather, and the fact that all those cadets in tight formation were -- literally -- walking the boots off each other. They would catch the edges of each other's galoshes and pull them off as they walked, leaving piles of boots in their wake.






















(Images are from the fantastic Life Mag photo archive.)