Election night in Seattle
It was incredible.
In a theater at the Northwest Film Forum with a lot of like minded folks who counted down till the West Coast polls closed and then started cheering and crying and laughing and hugging all at once when they called it. Dev and I put on the blue party hats that I bought and made noise with our noisemakers and I gave a lot of people blue Mardi Gras beads. Everyone kept grinning and grinning and grinning, and I couldn't stop crying with how emotional it all was.
But then it became truly astounding.
We left the theater and went out on the streets of Capitol Hill. There were a few hundred people out in the street, whooping and hollering, dancing in the street to drum music.
And then we started moving. This huge group of Capitol Hill young people started marching down the hill, picking up a few hundred other people on the way. We marched into downtown, still chanting, still hollering (still blowing on my noisemaker in my case). I took my heels off and walked barefoot so that I could keep up with the pace of excitement. People kept joining us. There were nearly a thousand of us by the time we got down to Pike Place. Cars that got trapped by the impromptu parade were honking along with us, not at us, and people were holding their hands out the windows for high fives and waving Obama signs out their sunroofs. Cops showed up, but they redirected traffic so that things could run smoothly and we wouldn't get hurt, and made no effort to disperse the crowd. The Stranger (a local weekly paper) was having their election night party in The Showbox, and huge numbers of people that were in that party joined us. There was a band, there was more dancing, there was unrestrained glee. After awhile we marched on, back up the hill and down Third Avenue. The Capitol hill people marched back up the hill, where I'm sure they partied all night, and Dev and I went home, completely exhausted by our sudden deficit of adrenaline.
The U district was apparently a similar scene, as was Broadway up on the hill.
I've never seen anything like it. This is going to be one of those times that we will look back on when we're "all grown up" and remember where we were and what happened and bore the next generation with our stories about it.
Here's a news article about it:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008353032_webstreetscene05m.html
Here's the start of the impromptu parade that Dev and I were involved with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6KWpigydAg
And all the videos of the Capitol Hill party are very very similar to what went on downtown.
Amazing amazing amazing.
In a theater at the Northwest Film Forum with a lot of like minded folks who counted down till the West Coast polls closed and then started cheering and crying and laughing and hugging all at once when they called it. Dev and I put on the blue party hats that I bought and made noise with our noisemakers and I gave a lot of people blue Mardi Gras beads. Everyone kept grinning and grinning and grinning, and I couldn't stop crying with how emotional it all was.
But then it became truly astounding.
We left the theater and went out on the streets of Capitol Hill. There were a few hundred people out in the street, whooping and hollering, dancing in the street to drum music.
And then we started moving. This huge group of Capitol Hill young people started marching down the hill, picking up a few hundred other people on the way. We marched into downtown, still chanting, still hollering (still blowing on my noisemaker in my case). I took my heels off and walked barefoot so that I could keep up with the pace of excitement. People kept joining us. There were nearly a thousand of us by the time we got down to Pike Place. Cars that got trapped by the impromptu parade were honking along with us, not at us, and people were holding their hands out the windows for high fives and waving Obama signs out their sunroofs. Cops showed up, but they redirected traffic so that things could run smoothly and we wouldn't get hurt, and made no effort to disperse the crowd. The Stranger (a local weekly paper) was having their election night party in The Showbox, and huge numbers of people that were in that party joined us. There was a band, there was more dancing, there was unrestrained glee. After awhile we marched on, back up the hill and down Third Avenue. The Capitol hill people marched back up the hill, where I'm sure they partied all night, and Dev and I went home, completely exhausted by our sudden deficit of adrenaline.
The U district was apparently a similar scene, as was Broadway up on the hill.
I've never seen anything like it. This is going to be one of those times that we will look back on when we're "all grown up" and remember where we were and what happened and bore the next generation with our stories about it.
Here's a news article about it:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008353032_webstreetscene05m.html
Here's the start of the impromptu parade that Dev and I were involved with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6KWpigydAg
And all the videos of the Capitol Hill party are very very similar to what went on downtown.
Amazing amazing amazing.