Quiz #105. Still Standing
Reflections on the inauguration of 2021 in Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for January 24, 2021.
Like millions of Americans, this week Sara and I watched the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Because I was working nights on Wednesday, January 20th, I watched the swearing-in ceremony like a private citizen--or at least as much as that is possible for me with my work in TV news,
Not in a newsroom. Not in a control room. Not on location.
At home. Sitting next to my wife with our dogs in between us.
Sara and I were joined by our office-mates, Stella, Happy, Fred and Brownie. For them, it was just another stay-at-home day at the office in their wonderful world of unending Saturdays. The dogs slept through history. Note Sara’s left foot in the upper right.
In my career in TV news, I’ve chronicled, covered and even attended inaugurations before. They’re wonderful and each one is its own powerful moment in history.
Me covering the inauguration of George Bush, the 43rd President, in January, 1989 with colleagues Vernon Odom and Brian Bazemore.
In 1989, when we covered the parade, the crew got some video of Annie, Ted and the children of college friends Bill and Leslie along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Beyond history and any discussion of this profound transition of power in 2021, like a lot of us, Sara and I were struck by two people who were celebrated at--and after--the inauguration: Amanda Gorman and Bernie Sanders. Gorman for her ground-breaking poem, announcing the young woman’s arrival on the nation’s stage; Sanders for a silly meme that took off because it captured the spirit of an old man’s no-nonsense approach to life and change in our nation’s capital.
Sara sent me a link to Anderson Cooper’s Wednesday night interview with Gorman after a friend had sent it to her. Cooper’s more than a bit gushing, saying at one point, “Wow. You’re awesome!” but the interview captures Gorman’s spirit and brilliance.
It’s also a great interview because Cooper asked good questions and listened to the answers. As someone in TV news, Cooper wanted to know what images from the Capitol insurrection had motivated Gorman’s work. Her answer seemed to surprise him. For her, it wasn’t about the images. It was about the words.
COOPER: Were there particular images from January 6th that were foremost in your mind or was it the totality, the horror of the insurrection?
GORMAN: I’m a poet so often I don’t work in images. I work in words and text. And so what I actually did, while keeping my mental sanity, was looking through the tweets, the text messages, the articles and seeing what stood out. There’s a line in the poem which you might have heard which is, “We’ve seen a force which would shatter a nation rather than share it.” I got that actually from looking through tweets and people going, like, “This is what happens when people don’t want to share the country with the rest of us.” And I took that, which also became a meme on Twitter, and put it into the poem.
As noted in Quiz #45. “Strange Condition,” I do not process words well when I hear them. In part, it’s because I have a slight hearing loss, but also it’s just not the way my brain works--especially with music. Sara will listen to a song that I’ve heard a dozen times and ask me what I think about the story behind the lyrics. I don’t have a clue. I don’t really process the words until I read them.
With Gorman’s poem, I of course heard the words and understood them, but I did not fully absorb the poem until after the ceremony when I read it. For me, in the moment as a visual, old guy with hearing issues, I was more struck by the motion of Gorman's hands and her bright yellow coat. For me, from now on, seeing that vibrant yellow will be a reminder of Gorman and “The Hill We Climb.”
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it.
If only we're brave enough to be it.
For days in the house after the inauguration, Sara and I tracked the silly but wonderful memes of Sanders that spread across social media. A reminder that laughter’s still possible in the middle of this deadly pandemic, I’d spot a “Bernie” meme on Twitter from my office in the guest bedroom and text it to Sara. I’d wait 30 seconds to hear her chuckle from the room next door. We found the website where you could put “Bernie” in front of your own house. (That website’s since been shutdown after nearly 10-million hits!)
Fittingly, using a Google image of our house from a random sunny afternoon, “Bernie” appeared in front of our house on recycling day.
Not surprisingly, the woman who made the mittens for Bernie--and gave them to him unsolicited 4 years ago--has never even met him. She was profiled by Matthew Kassel for the Jewish Insider.
They were made by Jen Ellis, a 42-year-old second grade teacher and craft hobbyist who lives in Essex Junction, Vt., outside Burlington — where Sanders was mayor in the 1980s — with her partner, Liz, and their kindergarten-age daughter. She gave the mittens to Sanders as a gift five years ago, but has never met him, even though she is an admirer.
Ellis was flooded with requests and orders for the homemade mittens which she makes from old sweaters. True to form, she’s not interested in capitalizing on her moment.
Despite the interest, Ellis had no plans to meet the demand. “Honestly, I don’t really do it a lot anymore,” said Ellis, who has sold her mittens — which she calls “swittens,” a portmanteau of sweater and mittens — online and at craft fairs. “I’m flattered that they want them, but there are lots of people on Etsy who sell them and hopefully people will get some business from them,” she said. “But I’m not going to quit my day job. I am a second grade teacher, and I’m a mom, and all that keeps me really busy.”
Thanks to Brian Stelter’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, I read the Esquire interview that Rob LeDonne did with veteran photographer Brendan Smialowski who took the image of “Bernie.” Not surprisingly, Smialowski, too, is modest.
… it’s not a great photo, but it is a nice moment. I took the picture for a reason, it’s a good slice of life. It trades on who this man is. I think why it’s successful has very little to do with my actual picture, but more to do with Bernie Sanders and his followers and his well-defined image that can carry something like this.
Smialowski describes how this wasn’t his first inauguration, going into detail about the technical challenges of working at inaugurations through the years, in the cold, atop a 30-foot-tall platform, typically crowded with other photographers. He also talks about the challenge of capturing the complicated story lines of any inauguration--and especially this one--in just one image. In part, he says he knew to focus on people with interesting story lines and that led him to pay attention to Sanders who’d run against Biden for the Democratic nomination.
I’d seen him walk in and was watching how he mingled with people, but he kept to himself. Bernie is politically independent, and he’s probably personally independent as well. So I think he’s fine sitting in a chair by himself. But I was keeping an eye on him because he’s one of these people who is also actually very easy to photograph… These aren’t beautiful photos and there isn’t amazing composition involved in this. It can be very difficult to make one because it’s very busy up there. When I took the photo, I practiced a technique I learned from photographing sports: you look through the camera with one eye, but then you keep your other eye open to kind of look around (for other possibilities). So when you have a long lens, you can use your other eye to see everything at once. My lens was originally on somebody else, but out of my other eye I saw him fiddling with his hands and I just very quickly went back to him. I originally thought I had missed it.
In my own pandemic project of scanning my old family photos to digital, I recently came across some images I took from a 1991 visit to the Outer Banks. One set of images shows 9-year-old Annie at the water’s edge, standing in the surf, arms wide open as a wave is about to crash down on her.
On Friday morning, January 22nd, I texted the images to Annie. I needed to resend one of the images because there was a glitch when I first sent it. We traded some texts.
Annie did post the arms-wide-open image to social media. I do hope some people found it inspiring. As much as I like that image, however, the one that strikes me is the last in the bunch.
Smiling—and still standing.
What did not happen?
A. On Saturday morning, I checked the feed from the Ring camera which, as noted in Quiz #103 Ring in the New Year, we installed in the backyard to keep track of critters. On Saturday, I found our first sighting of animals beyond the dogs. At 3:31AM, the Ring showed a fox chasing a rabbit. We think the bunny escaped;
B. When I woke up Saturday morning, I read an email from Jackpocket informing me that I’d won $2 in the MegaMillions from a lottery ticket I’d purchased online;
C. On Saturday morning, Ted texted me that the winning MegaMillions ticket worth $1 billion dollars had been sold at a grocery store less than a mile from his Michigan warehouse;
D. This Saturday may have been our least active day of the stay-at-home pandemic. I won’t tell you when I woke up, but Sara and I did not get dressed until 2:30 in the afternoon--and by that time, I’d taken 2 naps;
E. On Saturday, Sara started reading “The Nix” by Nathan Hill, a novel I had championed back in 2016 when it came out. Sara told me that she’s waited to read it because she doesn’t like being told what to do.
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #106. These Things Don’t Just Happen.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #104. Conduct Unbecoming.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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