What dresses up like Elvis, asks people awkward questions, and draws enough fans to shut down an entire city for a whole day?
Well that, my friends, would be Stephen Colbert.
He and John Stewart, his Comedy Central partner in crime, hosted their Rally to Restore Fear and/or Sanity on Saturday, and made a lot of cab drivers A LOT of money in the process.
Sure, I'm all quippy and over it now, but Saturday I was furiously conjuring up plans for a scathing expose on the incompetency of cab agencies in Washington, DC. - Seriously, how can you just NOT call me back...at all...ever.
Ridiculous. What if I had been mortally wounded!? (and just for the sake of this argument, in my well-thought out hypothetical example, all available ambulances are simultaneously in use). Or in a really big hurry to get somewhere very very important!? Like a rally. That started 2 hours ago. That I missed the first half of.
Ok. There remains the slight potential that I am not, in fact, entirely over it.
Regardless, even if I did have to hitchhike to it, the rally was such a cool thing to witness, and I'm really glad I risked my life riding with total strangers (read: a really nice old couple who were more concerned about whether we were buckled up, than I assume they were with killing and subsequently eating us) in order to get there.
Despite all the amusing signs, strange costumes, big-name artists and media hype, the thing that stood out the most to me amidst it all was the shocking and unexpected politeness of Saturday's crowd. There were enough "excuse-mes", "pleases" and "thank yous" to dumbfound Julie Andrews, and the average body distance maintained was significantly higher than I've ever seen any church or upper-class gathering.
I've yet to formulate a theory on why this might be - so your guess is as good as mine. I do have to say, though, that it's not what I expected from a rowdy group of largely college-aged kids. Especially since there were SO many different viewpoints present - tea partiers, hippies, main-stream republicans - not to mention the distractingly colorful assortment of quite possibly unstable personalities.
The whole experience was great, though, and totally worth the entire afternoon that it took to get back to the dorm.
Yup. Totally worth it. Completely worth it. It was definitely, most assuredly and unquestionably worth the 4.5 hours of waiting in line, unsuccessfully hailing cabs and missing buses.
No doubt about it. At all. Whatsoever.
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