A well-behaved crowd of hipsters and oldsters

Really, if you saw it on TV, you saw and heard far more than I did. More than once, the crowd around us chanted, “Louder! Louder!” We heard snippets of Ozzie Osbourne, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Kid Rock and Tony Bennett. We heard most of Jon Stewart’s impassioned soliloquy. (”We work together every damn day” got big applause.)

We arrived late — surprise — with a visiting college student in tow. We walked from our house on Capitol Hill, so avoided the huge lines at the Metro. Here’s an amazing picture of people waiting in line to buy a farecard at the Shady Grove terminus. By 12:30, you couldn’t get anywhere near the stage in front of the Capitol and were routed back to 12th St. NW to get into the Mall. Once we made it to the Mall, we moved back east toward the Capitol, herded into the rectangles where the grass was being restored. Sorry about that, little grass. Then it was all about peering over the heads of the thousands of people and signs in front of us.

As a concert & comedy live show, it was frustrating. But as a scene unto itself, it was hugely entertaining. Some of the signs we saw:

• Free the House Elves
• Why Aren’t We Using the Metric System?
• Eat Pray Vote
• Seniors for Legal Pot
• Tolerance or Death
• Were Wolf for Congress
• Any One Up for Scrabble Later?
• I’m Just Here for the Chicks (held by a young woman)
• Hoosiers for Sanity
• This Is a Sign
• By a little girl in a fancy dress: I’m Taking Back My Tea Party

Now I’m going to go to YouTube and try to see what I missed.